The principles underlying Classic In Black, are to further introduce,
encourage and support the development,
production and dissemination of the musical and cultural structures of
Europe, The America's, Africa,
The Caribbean, Asian and Arabic societies, in a cross-cultural effort
to enhance the creation of regional,
national and when desired, an increasingly multi-influenced Classical
Music experience.
An integral pursuit of Classic In Black is to provide opportunities within
the aforementioned goals for the
indigenous people of Africa and the African Diaspora.
A Classic In Black radio program is presented monthly at the Open Channel
Berlin on 92.6 and
on the internet at www.okb.de by Harry Louiserre. Classic In Black is
also televised periodically
by The Collegium Television Program and presented during the annual Black
International Cinema
Festival, directed by Fountainhead® Tanz Theatre.

Marian Anderson
Contralto

PART I
At the peak of her career, Marian Anderson was regarded as the world's
greatest contralto.
When she made her Town Hall debut in New York on December 31, 1935,
Howard Taubman,
the New York Times reviewer, described it as "music-making that probed
too deep for words."

Marian Anderson was born on February 27, 1902 in Philadelphia and
as a young choir girl,
demonstrated her vocal talents by singing parts from soprano, alto,
tenor and bass. At the age of 19,
she began studying with Giuseppi Boghetti and four years later, appeared
as soloist with the
New York Philharmonic. After a short engagement with the Philadelphia
Symphony Orchestra,
she travelled to Europe on a scholarship granted by the National Association
Of Negro Musicians.

It was on Easter Sunday in 1939 that Miss Anderson gave what is perhaps
her most memorable concert,
singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after having been barred
from making an appearance at
Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).

In 1955, after years of succesfull concert work, she made her Metropolitan
debut in
Verdi's, A Masked Ball. Two years later, a state department tour
took her around the world.
In September of 1958, Miss Anderson was named to the U.S. delegation
to the United Nations.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

On January 7, 1955, Marian Anderson became the first African American
to perform at the Met, America's most highly esteemed opera house.
Anderson sang the role of a fortuneteller in an opera by the Italian composer
Giuseppe Verdi, called Un Ballo in Maschera ("A Masked Ball").

PART IIIntroduction
Many African American operatic and concert singers, including Leontyne
Price, Jessye Norman, Shirley Verrett,
and Kathleen Battle, have credited Marian Anderson as their inspiration
to seek professional vocal careers.
Norman recalled the first recording she heard of the contralto: "I listened,
thinking,
'This can't be just a voice, so rich and beautiful.' It was a revelation.
And I wept."1
Other "Black Divas" have come before Anderson: Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield,
Marie Selika, and Sissieretta Jones;
none, however, was able to break through the glass ceiling of race and
obtain more than modest notoriety.
What was it about Marian Anderson that allowed her to go beyond the
level of professional success obtained by her
antecedents and even her contemporaries? Anderson's Early Years
Contralto Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A
variety of sources suggested February 17, 1902,
as her birthdate; however, Anderson's birth certificate, released after
her death, listed the date as February 27, 1897.
Her father was an ice and coal salesman, and her mother was a former
teacher.
Although Anderson had early showed an interest in the violin, she eventually
focused on singing. The Black community,
recognizing her talent, gave her financial and moral support. She also
gained the notice of tenor Roland Hayes,
who provided guidance in her developing career. Anderson faced overt
racism for the first time when she tried to apply
for admission to a local music school. She recalled her reaction to
the admissions clerk's racial comments:
"I don't think I said a word. I just looked at this girl and was shocked
that such words could come from one so young.
If she had been old and sour-faced I might not have been startled. I
cannot say why her youth shocked me as much as her words.
On second thought, I could not conceive of a person surrounded as she
was with the joy that is music without having some sense
of its beauty and understanding rub off on her. I did not argue with
her or ask to see her superior. It was as if a cold, horrifying hand
had been laid on me. I turned and walked out." 2
She did, however, find a teacher who gave her lessons for free. Later,
with donations from a local church, Anderson studied
with tenor/coach Giuseppe Boghetti. She toured regionally, gaining knowledge
and confidence with each performance.
In 1924, she gave her first recital at New York's Town Hall. The concert
revealed Anderson's discomfort with foreign
languages and almost caused her to end her vocal career.
Boghetti convinced her to continue her studies, but when Anderson was
unable to establish an active career in the United States,
she went to London in 1925 to study. She visited Germany and Finland,
where composer Jean Sibelius dedicated the song
"Solitude" to her. During the next ten years, she performed extensively
in Europe, including an appearance during a 1935
Mozart festival in Austria. She sang before the Archbishop of Salzburg
and many of Europe's leading musicians.
Her performance led the archbishop to request an encore of Schubert's
"Ave Maria" and Arturo Toscanini to state
"Yours is a voice one hears once in a hundred years."

Un
Ballo in Maschera ("A Masked Ball"), Giuseppe Verdi

The Milestones
Anderson returned to the United States in 1935 for a recital at Town
Hall, which this time was a critical success.
Under the management of Sol Hurok, she became the country's third highest
concert box office draw.
Her successes, however, did not exempt her from racial discrimination.
She was often refused accommodations
at restaurants, hotels, and concert halls. The most highly publicized
racial instance involving Anderson occurred
in 1939 when Hurok and officials from Howard University tried to arrange
a concert for her in Constitution Hall,
the largest and most appropriate indoor location in Washington, D.C.
The hall's owners, the Daughters of the
American Revolution, sparked national protests when they refused to
allow her to sing there.
In answer to the protests, the United States Department of the Interior,
with active encouragement from First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt, scheduled a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
on April 9, 1939. The Easter Sunday
program drew a crowd of 75,000 people and millions of radio listeners,
and the entire episode caused the news media
to focus greater attention on subsequent cases of discrimination involving
Anderson and other African Americans.
In 1954, Metropolitan Opera general manager Rudolf Bing signed Anderson
for the role of Ulrica in the Met's production
of Un Ballo in Maschera by Giuseppe Verdi. Her debut on January
7, 1955, marked the first time that an African American
had sung on the Met stage. Although critics described her performance
as beginning tentatively and her voice as showing
the effects of her age--she was 57, author Rosalyn Story explained:
Obviously, Bing could have given the honor of "first black" to someone
younger and musically stronger, like soprano
Mattiwilda Dobbs, who had succeeded at La Scala and the Glyndebourne
Festival in England, or baritone Robert McFerrin,
who was engaged at the Met immediately after Anderson. But the point
was clear; Anderson, whose career had quietly
and continuously broken barriers, dissolved hostilities, and awakened
the consciousness of an entire country, was the
only singer whose presence could signify the real meaning of the event.
The length and contour of her own journey,
from poor prodigy to artist-ambassador in the span of half a century,
mirrored the progress of an entire movement of
people advancing toward artistic and social equality. Anderson's life,
in simple terms, defined that movement.3
The singer received numerous awards and honors during her life. She
was given the NAACP's Spingarn Award by Roosevelt
in 1938 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson
in 1963. She received honorary doctorates
from over two dozen universities. Anderson performed before heads of
state, including the king and queen of England and
at the presidential inagurations of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
From 1957-58, she served as a goodwill
ambassador with the United States State Deparment. Anderson retired
in 1965 with a final concert, conducted by her nephew,
James De Priest, in Philadelphia. She settled with her husband, Orpheus
Fisher, on a farm in Connecticut until she moved
to De Priest's Portland, Oregon, home in July 1992. She suffered a stroke
the following spring and died of congestive heart
failure on April 8, 1993. In June, over 2,000 admirers attended a memorial
service held in her honor at Carnegie Hall in New York.
After short statements by violinist Isaac Stern and De Priest, the remainder
of the service consisted of playing several
representative recordings from Anderson's repertoire. Allan Kozinn wrote
that:
The memorial was a quiet, uncomplicatedly dignified affair, very much
in keeping with Miss Anderson's public persona.
The printed program carried the title "Remembering the Art of Marian
Anderson," and indeed the focus was on her singing,
not on her struggles and triumphs. . . . It was in the group of spirituals
that Miss Anderson's expressive range was best illuminated.
Included were her haunting accounts of "Crucifixion," "Sometimes I Feel
Like a Motherless Child" and "Were You There?,"
as well as representations of the brighter, more ebullient side of her
artistry, captured in her recordings of "Let Us Break Bread Together"
and "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."4 Conclusion
A true contralto, Anderson's vocal range went from a soul-stirring d
to a soul-lifting c'''. Her voice was large but had the
flexibility to be equally at home with Negro spirituals and German lieder.
Many used words such as rich, velvety, vibrant,
and expressive to try to describe her voice adequately. However, only
those who listened to her live performances or her
sound recordings could explain within the wordless vernacular of their
own souls what they heard.
De Priest said this about her personality:
She is obviously a tremendously strong person, and she had to go through
a great deal, being a woman, and being a black woman
at that time trying to build a career. But her dignity was such a powerful
force, and her faith was so strong, that while she obviously
was outraged, it would never be her style to be a seething cauldron,
and in private, to rant and rave. She was positive.
She knew what she wanted to do, she knew that no one should be in her
way preventing her from doing it because of her race.
And I think she probably felt that she was going to be clearing a path,
not just for herself, but for others to follow.
Anderson had a combination of dignity, serenity, perseverance, and talent
at a time when there was finally just enough tolerance
in this country to allow those traits to manifest themselves. She accepted
the responsibility of role model for the future with grace
and passed on a vast legacy of accomplishments to be not only met, but
surpassed by the African American singers who followed her. by Randye L. Jones
1 Allan Kozinn, "Marian Anderson Is Dead at 96; Singer Shattered Racial
Barriers," New York Times, 9 April 1993, A20.
2 Marian Anderson, My Lord, What a Morning (New York: Viking Press,
1956), 38.
3 Rosalyn M. Story, And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and
Concert (New York: Warner Books, 1990), 55.
4 Kozinn, "A Tribute to Marian Anderson, For the Most Part in Her Voice,"
New York Times, 8 June 1993, B8.
5 Story, 57.

Sissieretta Jones, (1869-1933)

She sang for kings, died in poverty

Sissieretta Jones was a pioneer of black operatic singing,
and she paved the way for a long list of black opera singers
to follow, including Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Leontyne Price,
and Grace Bumbry, among others.

From 1890 to 1916, Sissieretta Jones was one of the best-known and
highest-paid black singers in America.
She sang for U.S. presidents and for royalty in Europe, and drew sellout
crowds with her own minstrel show,
Black Patti's Troubadors. But she died nearly penniless in Providence.
Born in Virginia in 1869, Matilda Sissieretta Joyner was the daughter
of a minister of the African Methodist Church.
The family moved to Providence in 1876, and Sissieretta attended Meeting
Street and Thayer Schools in Providence.
From an early age, she sang for the public - at school functions and
festivals at Pond Street Church.
She married in 1883 when she was only 14, and had one child, Mabel,
who died before the age of 2.
Her husband, David Richmond Jones, was her manager for several years
but apparently squandered
and mismanaged her money. They divorced in 1899.
When she was 18, she attended the New England Conservatory in Boston,
one of the best music schools in America.
By 1887, Sissieretta had begun to draw public acclaim, appearing in
front of 5,000 people at Boston's Music Hall
in a benefit for the Parnell Defence Fund. In 1888, she made her successful
New York debut and was engaged
to tour the West Indies with a black troupe.
During that tour, she was presented with the first of many medals she
was often photographed wearing.
As Sissieretta's fame grew, she began to be known as "The Black Patti,"
a phrase coined by a
New York City newspaper, comparing her to the great Italian opera singer
Adelina Patti.
Although Sissieretta reportedly disliked the name, it remained with
her throughout her career.
In 1892, she sang for President Banjamin Harrison in the White House
and starred in the Grand African Jubilee,
a three-day event at New York's Madison Square Garden.
After she signed a three-year contract with Maj. J.B. Pond, a manager
of other well-known singers
and lecturers such as Mark Twain and the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Jones's
fees began to rise.
She was paid $2,000 for a week's appearance at the Pittsburgh Exposition,
the highest fee ever paid to
a black artist. (By comparison, Adelina Patti was paid $4,000 a night.)
After legal troubles involving her husband's attempt to book appearances
for her independent of Pond,
Jones went to Europe for an extended tour.
She sang for the Prince of Wales and the Kaiser, and in a letter home
said that she encountered
much less racial prejudice in Europe.
"It matters not to them what is the color of an artist's skin," she
wrote. "If a man or a woman is a great actor,
or a great musician, or a great singer, they will extend a warm welcome.
. . .
It is the soul they see, not the color of the skin."
In 1896, Jones formed her own touring company, Black Patti's Troubadors,
which toured for the next 20 years,
playing black and white audiences alike. The show included Jones's singing
as well as vaudeville and minstrel acts.
Around 1916, she retired to her home in Providence. By the time she
died in 1933, her savings were nearly gone
and she had sold three of her four houses and most of her jewels and
medals.
In her final years, William Freeman, a real estate agent and president
of the local chapter of the NAACP,
paid her taxes, water bill and provided coal and wood.Source:
" 'An ornament and honor to her sex': New England Women from Valley
Forge to Fenway Park,"
a history curriculum researched and written by Jane Lancaster.

By NORA LOCKWOOD TOOHER
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Composer

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was one of England's most celebrated composers
at the turn of the century.
Born to a doctor from Sierra Leone and a British mother, he showed musical
gifts at age five and,
ten years later, entered the Royal College of Music in London. There he
studied with Sir Charles Wood
and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Fame was his with the premiere of Hiawatha's
Wedding Feast.
The beautiful aria "Onaway! Awake, Beloved," became one of the most popular
and frequently recorded
songs of the periods.

In 1901, the Coleridge-Taylor Society was founded in Washington, D.C.
specifically to study and perform
his music. Harry Burleigh was one of the soloists to perform under the
composer´s baton soon after,
along with a 200-voice choir, 52 musicians from the United States Marine
Band, and the supplementary
strings required by the Hiawatha music. The composer was very
warmly received.
James Weldon Johnson and Booker T. Washington were among his friends,
and he was President
Theodore Roosevelt´s guest at the White House.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Grace Bumbry
Mezzo-Soprano

Grace Brumbry is the first black performer to have sung at the Wagner
Festival in Bayreuth, Germany,
and one of the few young singers who can boast of having been called to
play a command performance
at the White House. Miss Bumbry, born in 1937, sang at a formal state
dinner opening Washington´s
official social season in 1962 as a guest of the Kennedys and the nation.
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Miss Bumbry, like many black singers,
had her first exposure to music
in a church choir, singing with her brothers and parents at the Union
Memorial Methodist Church
in St. Louis. After studying voice locally, she won a nationwide talent
contest in 1954, and went on,
with scholarship aid, to study successively at Boston and Northwestern
universities.
At the latter school, she attended master classes in opera and lieder
taught by the famed teacher,
Lotte Lehmann. Later competitions led to several important cash awards,
as well as contacts with
such important personages as Marian Anderson.
Beginning in 1959, Miss Bumbry traveled to various European countries,
performing in the operatic
capitals of the world. On July 23, 1961, Wieland Wagner, grandson of Richard
Wagner, shocked many
traditionalists by selecting Miss Bumbry to sing the role of Venus in
Tannhauser, a role which
conventionally calls for a figure of so-called Nordic beauty, usually
a tall and voluptuous blond.
Miss Bumbry proceeded to give a performance which won acclamation from
both the harshest
and the kindest of critics, all of whom praised her both for her physical
radiance and her brilliant singing.
After her Bayreuth engagement, Miss Bumbry returned to the United States
for a concert debut
at Carnegie Hall. Her recital was only moderately successful, however.
Over the years, critics seemed to question her ability to evolve as a
full-fledged interpreter of
German lieder, many preferring instead to view her as the possessor of
a big voice whose
calibre and quality are more aptly suited for opera. To some extent, it
would seem that she concurs
in this analysis, being on record as having once said: "My style is really
Verdi. This is my heart and soul."
In 1974 Miss Bumbry returned to the "Met" to sing nine performances of
Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

The intention of the C.I.B. program is
to attract the attention of supporters:

Financial, academic, artistic institutions and individuals, who in
tandem with theC.I.B. production team of Mr. Harry
Louiserre and Prof. Donald Muldrow Griffith
(Co-founder/director: Black International Cinema/Fountainhead Tanz Theatre/
The Collegium-Forum & Television Program Berlin/Cultural Zephyr e.V.)
will enable the production of the proposed festival.

The focal points of the program are:

A benefit concert with an intercultural group of soloists and choir,
in a Berlin performance venue.
The production of an opera relating to the festival theme and a photographic
exhibition featuring the contribution
of Black artists to classical music.

James DePreist
Conductor

A gifted and versatile musician, James DePreist has been active in several
areas of music
as a performer, composer, arranger and conductor. It is in the last-named
field that he has been
most often acclaimed by musicians and critics alike, as a young man of
rare ability.
This estimate was confirmed in 1965 when he was appointed assistant conductor
of the
New York Philharmonic. Born in Philadelphia on November 21, 1936, DePreist
studied piano
and percussion from the age of 10, but did not decide on a musical career
until he reached his
early 20s. After graduating from high school, he entered the Wharton School
at the
University of Pennsylvania as a pre-law student, receiving a B.S. in 1958
and an M.A. in 1961.
DePreist also studied music history, the theory of harmony and orchestration
at the
Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, and composition with the distinguished
American composer,
Vincent Persichetti. In 1962, the State Department sponsored a cultural
exchange tour of
the Near and Far East, engaging DePreist as an American specialist in
music. During this
tour, DePreist was stricken with polio, paralyized in both legs, and flown
home for intensive therapy.
Within six months, he had fought his way back to the point where he could
walk with the aid
of crutches and braces. Courage, determination and talent carried him
to the semi-finals
of the 1963 Dmitri Mitropoulos International Music Competition for Conductors.
After another overseas tour as conductor in residence in Thailand, DePreist
returned to the
United States, appearing with the Minneapolis International Symphony Orchestra,
the New York
Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1964, he recorded what
is perhaps his most
satisfying triumph, capturing first prize in the Mitropoulos International
Competition.
Another highlight of his career occurred on June 28, 1965 when he conducted
Marian Anderson´s
farewell concert at Philadelphia´s Robin Hood Dell.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Leontyne Price
Lyric Soprano

Leontyne Price is one of the world´s leading lyric sopranos. Her career
in concerts and opera
has brought her the praise of public and critics alike. Miss Price was
born in Laurel, Mississippi
on February 10, 1927, and received her B.A. in 1948 from the College of
Educational and
Industrial Arts (now Central State College) in Wilberforce, Ohio. She
later accepted a scholarship
to Juilliard where she studied with Florence Page Kimball. After seeing
her in the student
production of Verdi´s Falstaff, Virgil Thompson, the noted critic
selected her to sing in the
revival of his Four Saints in Three Acts which was performed on
Broadway for two weeks
in 1952. She then played the role of Bess in the 1952 revival of Porgy
and Bess, and continued
in the part on a tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department. During the
run of Porgy and Bess,
she introduced works by Stravinsky, Henri Saguet, John La Montaine and
others at such places
as the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Constitution Hall in Washington,
D.C..
In 1954, she gave a successful Town Hall recital and, the following year,
sang Tosca
for the NBC-TV Opera Company. She later appeared on this network in The
Magic Flute (1956);Dialogue of the Carmelites (1957), and Don Giovanni (1960).
Miss Price made her
Metropolitan debut in Il Trovatore on January 27, 1961. Since then,
she has made numerous
recordings of operas and operatic arias. She is married to the noted black
bass baritone,
William Warfield. Just one season after she had made her Met debut as
Leonora in Verdi´sIl Trovatore, Miss Price had her first Met opening in 1961 in the
title role of Puccini´sThe Girl of the Golden West. Since then, she has made numerous
recordings of operas and
operatic arias. In September of 1966. Miss Price opened the Metropolitan
Opera season in
the role of Cleopatra. The opera (Anthony and Cleopatra) was said
to have been written
by composer Samuel Barber with her in mind. In the world of opera, Miss
Price ranks alongside
Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland and Renata Tebaldi as one of the most
esteemed and celebrated
sopranos of the contemporary era. Her voice is said to be the perfect
Verdi voice; her Aida is often
regarded as the paragon against which all others should be measured.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Shirley Verrett
Mezzo-Soprano

Mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett is a striking and talented recitalist and
opera performer, whose
most electrifying role has been in the title role of Bizet´s Carmen which
she has performed
to rave notices in the great opera houses of the world. Born of a musical
family in New Orleans,
Miss Verrett moved to California at the age of five, but had no formal
voice training during her
childhood, largely because her father felt singing would involve his daughter
in too
precarious a career. Still, he offered his daughter the opportunity to
sing in church choirs under
his direction, and provided her with an ample education at Ventura College,
where she majored
in business administration. By 1954, she was a prosperous real-estate
agent, but her longing
for an artistic career had become so acute that she decided to take voice
lessons in Los Angeles
and train her sights on the concert stage after all. After winning a television
talent show in 1955,
she enrolled at the Juilliard School on a scholarship, taking her diploma
in voice some six years
later. Her debut at Town Hall in 1958 was not a sensational one, earning
plaudits for her "sensitive,
imaginative...comprehension," even as it inspired the conclusion that
she was perhaps only an
"earnest, conscientious" singer who was well coached and adequately prepared.
At Spoleto, Italy in 1962, she deliverd an excellent Carmen and
was praised for a "warm vibrant
voice and earthy womanliness." A year later, she performed at Lincoln
Center in New York,
where her recital was said to be "simply without flaws, simply a great
event in the annals of
American music-making." By 1964, her Carmen had improved so dramatically
that the New York
Herald Tribune critic was able to claim it was "the finest" performance
"seen or heard in New York"
for the past generation. Other performances in such roles as Orfeo in
Gluck´s Orfeo ed Euridice and
and as Ulrica in Verdi´s Un Ballo de Maschera have been met with
comparable acclaim.
Possessed of a remarkable range, Miss Verrett sustains a steady low register,
a velvety middle
register, and a clean, commanding, and opulent upper register. She does
not add to her repertory
too rapidly, lest she sacrifice true understanding of the character in
whom the tones and music
are supposed to realize their ultimate importance.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Gwendolyn Bradley
Soprano

The American soprano Gwendolyn Bradley, who since 1988 has been a
member of the Deutsche Oper Berlin
has become a favorite of the Berlin public. She made her debut in 1987
as Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto.
With her bell like voice, her charm and sparkling stage presence, she
is captivating not only in female roles
such as Gilda, Susanna, Nannetta, Sophie or Pamina but also the pert
Blondchen, capricious Zerbinetta and Musetta
or the androgynous Oscar. After establishing herself at the Metropolitan
Opera, debuting in 1981 where she sang
such roles as Fiakermilli in Arabella, Blondchen in Die Entführung
aus dem Serail, Gilda in Rigoletto,
Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos, Olympia in Le Conte d'Hoffman,
the title role of
Stravinsky's Le Rossignol and Clara in Porgy and Bess,
Miss Bradley made her European debut
in 1983 with the Netherlands Opera in the title role of Handel's Rodelinda.
As an accomplished concert singer, she has worked with such conductors
as Zubin Mehta, New York Philharmonic/Israeli
Symphony; Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra; Mstislav Rostropovich
and Fruebeck de Burgos,
Washington National Symphony Orchestra; Charles Dutoit, Montreal Symphony/Philadelphia
Orchestra; Andre Previn,
Pittsburgh Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, Los Angeles Philharmonic;
Marek Janowski, Hans Graf,
Christopher Hogwood, Ralf Weikert, Victor Pablo Perez, among others.
A versatile artist, her concert repertoire
encompasses important works from the Barock to the 20th century.
Miss Bradley is a frequent guest on the stage of the Los Angeles Opera
as Oscar, Blondchen, Zerbinetta, Romilda,
Zerlina, and in the 1997-98 season as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte.
On European opera stages as Zerbinetta in Paris,
Montpellier, Nice, Monte Carlo, Susanna and Pamina in Madrid, Blonchen
in Munich, Adina, Blondchen, Susanna,
Zerbinetta in Hamburg, Despina in Barcelona, Oscar in Vienna, Rodelinde
in Amsterdam and Fiakermilli in Glyndebourne.
Highlights of recent concert engagements have included Brahms Requiem
(Palermo, Segovia, San Sebastian),
Mahler Symphonies (Los Angeles Philharmonic), Festival D'Auvers-Sur-Oise,
Mozart works, Haydn's
Orfeo and Euridice in Madrid, as well as appearances with orchestras
in Leipzig, Valencia, Warsaw, Krakow,
Lyon, Prag, Montreal, Berlin, among others.
As a recitalist in Paris, Tokyo, Lisbon, San Sebastian, Los Angeles
and New York Miss Bradley has established her
reputation. Miss Bradley has recorded Fiakermilli in Arabella
with Dame Kiri Tekanawa, Jeffrey Tate
conducting for Decca Records, Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three
Acts for Nonesuch records and a live
concert recording of Mozart concert works, with members of the Orchestre
Symphonique Français.

Denyce Graves
Mezzo-Soprano

Denyce Graves rose from modest origins to become one of the finest
mezzo-sopranos in the world.
She was born in a rough area of southwest Washington, D.C. Her father
left her family when Graves was one
year old, and her mother struggled to support the family through most
of her childhood. Graves' early musical
education was limited to singing gospel in her church's choir. When
a few of Graves' junior high school teachers
encouraged her to attend the Duke Ellington School for the Arts, one
of Washington's most prestigious public schools,
she decided to go even though she had no particular interest in music.
The interest, needless to say, developed;
at the Ellington School, she studied French melodies, German Lieder,
and jazz in addition to the operatic arias
which would eventually make her famous. The Ellington School is a fine
one, and upon graduation, Graves had
developed her gift enough that Oberlin College in Ohio granted her a
scholarship.
Graves got her first major exposure at the Houston Grand Opera, for
which she performed from 1988 to 1990.
Her reputation grew quickly, particularly on the strength of her exciting
interpretations of the title roles in
Georges Bizet's Carmen and Camille Saint-Saens' Samson et
Dalila. Graves made her Metropolitan Opera
debut in the 1995 - 1996 season, singing Carmen. Her star has
only risen since then. She has worked with conductors
including Riccardo Chailly, Charles Dutoit, Zubin Mehta, Placido Domingo,
and Mstislav Rostropovich;
shared a stage with singers such as Domingo, Josi Cura, and the popular
crossover sensation Andrea Bocelli;
and sung at opera houses including the Royal Opera at Covent Garden,
La Scala Milan, Vienna Staatsoper,
and Opera Nationale de Paris. Graves' fame does not stem only from her
concerts and operatic roles;
she had made efforts to branch out and draw nontraditional audiences
into classical music.
The PBS special Denyce Graves: A Cathedral Christmas was taped at Washington,
D.C.'s National Cathedral,
and airs every year on PBS during the Christmas season. She also frequently
appears on the children's program
Sesame Street. Crossover repertoire and spirituals make frequent appearances
in her recitals.
Whether she is performing a Scarlatti cantata, a popular song, or something
in between, Graves' voice is marvelously
expressive and vibrant. Intelligent musicianship and a mesmerizing stage
presence
(due at least partially to her stunning beauty) complete the package.
Graves is married to lutenist David Perry,
and resides in Leesburg, Virginia. ~ Andrew Lindemann Malone, All Music
Guide

Career
Admitted to the Bar of New York; employed in a law firm, 1923; actor;
stage appearances include Simon the Cyrenian,
1921, All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1924, Show Boat (musical), 1928,
Othello, 1930 and 1943, and
Toussaint L'Ouverture, 1936; films appearances include Body and Soul,
1924, The Emperor Jones, 1933,
Sanders of the River, 1935, and Show Boat, 1936; singer; recording and
performing artist.

Paul Robeson--singer, actor, civil rights activist, law school graduate,
athlete, scholar, author--was perhaps
the best known and most widely respected black American of the 1930s
and 1940s.
Robeson was also a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union, and a man,
later in his life, widely vilified
and censored for his frankness and unyielding views on issues to which
public opinion ran contrary.
As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and powerful.
He learned to speak more than
20 languages in order to break down the barriers of race and ignorance
throughout the world, and yet,
as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, for
the last 25 years of his life his was
"a great whisper and a greater silence in black America."

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, Robeson was spared most of
the daily brutalities suffered by
African Americans around the turn of the century. But his family was
not totally free from hardship.
Robeson's mother died from a stove-fire accident when he was six. His
father, a runaway slave who became
a pastor, was removed from an early ministerial position. Nonetheless,
from his father Robeson learned
diligence and an "unshakable dignity and courage in spite of the press
of racism and poverty."
These characteristics, Stuckey noted, defined Robeson's approach in
his beliefs and actions throughout his life.
Having excelled in both scholastics and athletics as a youth, Robeson
received a scholarship to Rutgers College
(now University), where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior
year and chosen valedictorian in his senior.
He earned varsity letters in four sports and was named Rutgers' first
All-American in football.
Fueled by his class prophecy to be "the leader of the colored race in
America," Robeson went on to earn a
law degree from Columbia University, supporting himself by playing professional
football on the weekends.
After graduation he obtained a position with a New York law firm only
to have his career halted,
as was recalled in Martin Baulm Duberman's Paul Robeson, when a stenographer
refused to take down a memo,
saying, "I never take dictation from a nigger." Sensing this episode
as indicative of the climate of the law,
Robeson left the bar. While in law school, Robeson had married fellow
Columbia student Eslanda Cardozo Goode,
who encouraged him to act in amateur theatrical productions. Convinced
by his wife and friends to return to
the theater after his departure from law, Robeson joined the Provincetown
Players, a group associated with
playwright Eugene O'Neill. Two productions in which he starred, The
Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings, brought Robeson critical acclaim.
Contemporary drama critic George Jean Nathan,
quoted by Newsweek's Hubert Saal, called Robeson "thoroughly eloquent,
impressive, and convincing."
Thus Robeson continued on the stage, winning applause from critics and
audiences, gaining an international
reputation for his performances on the London stage, and eventually
extending his acting repertoire to include films.
His stage presence was undeniable, and with the musical Show Boat
and Shakespeare's Othello,
Robeson's reputation grew even larger. In Show Boat he sang the
immensely popular "Ol' Man River,"
displaying a powerful, warm, soothing voice. Robeson, realizing his
acting range was limited both by the
choice of roles available to him as a black performer and by his own
acting abilities, turned to singing full time
as an outlet for his creative energies and growing social convictions.
Robeson had been giving solo vocal performances since 1925, but it wasn't
until he traveled to Britain
that his singing became for him a moral cause. Robeson related years
later in his autobiography,
Here I Stand, that in England he "learned that the essential character
of a nation is determined not by the upper
classes, but by the common people, and that the common people of all
nations are truly brothers in the great
family of mankind." Consequently, he began singing spirituals and work
songs to audiences of common citizens
and learning the languages and folk songs of other cultures, for "they,
too, were close to my heart and expressed
the same soulful quality that I knew in Negro music." Nathan Irvin Huggins,
writing in the Nation, defined this
pivotal moment: "[Robeson] found the finest expression of his talent.
His genuine awe of and love for the common
people and their music flourished throughout his life and became his
emotional and spiritual center."
Continued travels throughout Europe in the 1930s brought Robeson in
contact with members of politically
left-leaning organizations, including socialists and African nationalists.
Singing to, and moving among,
the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, the working classes, Robeson
began viewing "himself and his art
as serving the struggle for racial justice for nonwhites and economic
justice for workers of the world," Huggins noted.
A critical journey at that time, one that changed the course of his
life, was to the Soviet Union.
Paul Robeson author Duberman depicted Robeson's time there: "Nights
at the theater and opera, long walks
with [film director Sergei] Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings,
trips to hospitals, children's centers,
factories ... all in the context of a warm embrace." Robeson was ecstatic
with this new-found society, concluding,
according to New York Times Book Review contributor John Patrick Diggins,
"that the country was entirely free of
racial prejudice and that Afro-American spiritual music resonated to
Russian folk traditions.
'Here, for the first time in my life ... I walk in full human dignity.'"
Diggins went on to assert that Robeson's
"attraction to Communism seemed at first more anthropological than ideological,
more of a desire to discover old,
lost cultures than to impose new political systems. ... Robeson convinced
himself that American blacks as
descendants of slaves had a common culture with Russian workers as descendants
of serfs."
Regardless of his ostensibly simple desire to believe in a cultural
genealogy, Robeson soon become a vocal
advocate of communism and other left-wing causes. He returned to the
United States in the late 1930s, Newsweek' s
Saal observed, becoming "a vigorous opponent of racism, picketing the
White House, refusing to sing before
segregated audiences, starting a crusade against lynching, and urging
Congress to outlaw racial bars in baseball."
After World War II, when relations between the United States and the
Soviet Union froze into the Cold War,
many former advocates of communism backed away from it. When the crimes
of Soviet leader Josef Stalin
became public--forced famine, genocide, political purges--still more
advocates left the ranks of communism.
Robeson, however, was not among them. National Review contributor Joseph
Sobran explained why:
"It didn't matter: he believed in the idea, regardless of how it might
be abused. In 1946 the former All-American
explained his loyalty to an investigating committee: 'The coach tells
you what to do and you do it.'
It was incidental that the coach was Stalin." Robeson could not publicly
decry the Soviet Union even after he,
most probably, learned of Stalin's atrocities because "the cause, to
his mind," Nation contributor Huggins theorized,
"was much larger than the Soviet Union, and he would do nothing to sustain
the feeding frenzy of the American right."
Robeson's popularity soon plummeted in response to his increasing rhetoric.
After he urged black youths not to
fight if the United States went to war against the Soviet Union, a riot
prevented his appearing at a concert in
Peekskill, New York. But his desire was never to leave the United States,
just to change, as he believed,
the racist attitude of its people. In his autobiography Robeson recounted
how during the infamous McCarthy hearings,
when questioned by a Congressional committee about why he didn't stay
in the Soviet Union, he replied,
"Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country,
and I am going to stay right here
and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will
drive me from it. Is that clear?"
In 1950 the U.S. Department of State revoked Robeson's passport, ensuring
that he would remain in the United States.

Robeson's passport was restored in 1958 after a Supreme Court ruling
on a similar case, but it was of little
consequence. By then he had become a nonentity. When Robeson's autobiography
was published that year,
leading literary journals, including the New York Times and the New
York Herald-Tribune refused to review it.
Robeson traveled again to the Soviet Union, but his health began to
fail. He tried twice to commit suicide.
"Pariah status was utterly alien to the gregarious Robeson. He became
depressed at the loss of contact with
audiences and friends, and suffered a series of breakdowns that left
him withdrawn and dependent on
psychotropic drugs," Dennis Drabble explained in Smithsonian. Slowly
deteriorating and virtually unheard
from in the 1960s and 1970s, Robeson died after suffering a stroke in
1976.

During his life Paul Robeson inspired thousands with his voice--raised
in speech and song.
But because of his singular support for communism and Stalin, because
his life in retrospect became
"a pathetic tale of talent sacrificed, loyalty misplaced, and idealism
betrayed," according to Jim Miller in Newsweek,
Robeson disappeared in sadness and loneliness. His life, full of desire
and achievement, passion and conviction,
"the story of a man who did so much to break down the barriers of a
racist society, only to be brought down
by the controversies sparked by his own radical politics," New York
Times Book Review contributor Diggins
pronounced, "is at once an American triumph and an American tragedy."

Sources
Books: Duberman, Martin Baulm, Paul Robeson, Knopf, 1988. Robeson, Paul,
Here I Stand, Beacon, 1971.
Periodicals: American Heritage, April 1989. Commentary, May 1989. Nation,
February 7, 1976; March 20, 1989.
National Review, May 19, 1989. New Leader, February 20, 1989. Newsweek,
February 2, 1976; February 13, 1989.
New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989. New York Times Book Review,
October 21, 1973; February 12, 1989.
Smithsonian, October 1989. Time, February 2, 1976; March 13, 1989. Times
Literary Supplement, September 5, 1958.

Paul Robeson was a famous African-American athlete, singer, actor,
and advocate for the civil rights of people
around the world. He rose to prominence in a time when segregation was
legal in the United States,
and Black people were being lynched by racist mobs, especially in the
South.
Born on April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul Robeson was the
youngest of five children.
His father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Lincoln
University, and his mother came from
an abolitionist Quaker family. Robeson's family knew both hardship and
the determination to rise above it.
His own life was no less challenging.
In 1915, Paul Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers
University.
Despite violence and racism from teammates, he won 15 varsity letters
in sports (baseball, basketball, track)
and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. He received the
Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year,
belonged to the Cap & Skull Honor Society, and graduated as Valedictorian.
However, it wasn't until 1995,
19 years after his death, that Paul Robeson was inducted into the College
Football Hall of Fame.
At Columbia Law School (1919-1923), Robeson met and married Eslanda
Cordoza Goode, who was to become
the first Black woman to head a pathology laboratory. He took a job
with a law firm, but left when a white secretary
refused to take dictation from him. He left the practice of law to use
his artistic talents in theater and music
to promote African and African-American history and culture.
In London, Robeson earned international acclaim for his lead role in
Othello, for which he won the Donaldson Award
for Best Acting Performance (1944), and performed in Eugene O'Neill's
Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings. He is known for changing the lines
of the Showboat song "Old Man River"
from the meek "...I'm tired of livin' and 'feared of dyin'....," to
a declaration of resistance, "...
I must keep fightin' until I'm dying....". His 11 films included Body
and Soul (1924), Jericho (1937), and Proud Valley (1939). Robeson's travels taught him that racism
was not as virulent in Europe as in the U.S..
At home, it was difficult to find restaurants that would serve him,
theaters in New York would only seat Blacks
in the upper balconies, and his performances were often surrounded with
threats or outright harassment.
In London, on the other hand, Robeson's opening night performance of
Emperor Jones brought the audience
to its feet with cheers for twelve encores.
Paul Robeson used his deep baritone voice to promote Black spirituals,
to share the cultures of other countries,
and to benefit the labor and social movements of his time. He sang for
peace and justice in 25 languages
throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa. Robeson became
known as a citizen of the world,
equally comfortable with the people of Moscow, Nairobi, and Harlem.
Among his friends were future African leader
Jomo Kenyatta, India's Nehru, historian Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, anarchist
Emma Goldman, and writers
James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1933, Robeson donated the proceeds
of All God's Chillun to Jewish
refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany. At a 1937 rally for the anti-fascist
forces in the Spanish Civil War,
he declared, "The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery.
I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
In New York in 1939, he premiered in Earl Robinson's Ballad for Americans,
a cantata celebrating the multi-ethnic,
multi-racial face of America. It was greeted with the largest audience
response since Orson Welles' famous
"War of the Worlds." During the 1940s, Robeson continued to perform
and to speak out against racism,
in support of labor, and for peace. He was a champion of working people
and organized labor.
He spoke and performed at strike rallies, conferences, and labor festivals
worldwide.
As a passionate believer in international cooperation, Robeson protested
the growing Cold War and worked
tirelessly for friendship and respect between the U.S. and the USSR.
In 1945, he headed an organization
that challenged President Truman to support an anti-lynching law. In
the late 1940s, when dissent was
scarcely tolerated in the U.S., Robeson openly questioned why African
Americans should fight in the army
of a government that tolerated racism. Because of his outspokenness,
he was accused by the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of being a Communist. Robeson
saw this as an attack on the
democratic rights of everyone who worked for international friendship
and for equality.
The accusation nearly ended his career. Eighty of his concerts were
canceled, and in 1949 two interracial
outdoor concerts in Peekskill, N.Y. were attacked by racist mobs while
state police stood by.
Robeson responded, "I'm going to sing wherever the people want me to
sing...and I won't be frightened
by crosses burning in Peekskill or anywhere else."
In 1950, the U.S. revoked Robeson's passport, leading to an eight-year
battle to resecure it and to travel again.
During those years, Robeson studied Chinese, met with Albert Einstein
to discuss the prospects for world peace,
published his autobiography, Here I Stand, and sang at Carnegie Hall.
Two major labor-related events took place
during this time. In 1952 and 1953, he held two concerts at Peace Arch
Park on the U.S.-Canadian border,
singing to 30-40,000 people in both countries. In 1957, he made a transatlantic
radiophone broadcast from
New York to coal miners in Wales. In 1960, Robeson made his last concert
tour to New Zealand and Australia.
In ill health, Paul Robeson retired from public life in 1963. He died
on January 23, 1976, at age 77, in Philadelphia.

Jessye Norman
Contralto, Mezzo and High Soprano

Born on September 15, 1945, in Augusta, Georgia, Jessye Norman was
reared in a musical family.
Both her mother and grandmother were pianists and her father sang in
church. Her mother was a
teacher and her father an insurance broker. She started singing spirituals
in the local baptist church
when she was four years old. She won a scholarship to Howard University
in Washington, D.C.,
where she studied voice. She graduated in 1967 and received further
training at the Peabody Conservatory
in Baltimore, Maryland, and at the University of Michigan. After winning
the Bavarian Radio Corporation
International Music Competition in 1968, Norman made her operatic debut
as Elisabeth in Wagner's Tannhauser in 1969 in Berlin. The beauty, range, and flexibility
of Norman's vibrant soprano voice
assured her further operatic engagements, the most notable being the
title role in Aida in productions
in Berlin and at La Scala in Milan, Italy, and the role of Cassandra
in Berlioz' Les Troyens
(The Trojans; Covent Garden, 1972). In 1989 she appeared at the
Metropolitan Opera for a historic performance
of that company's first single character production, Erwartung
by Arnold Schoenberg. Norman also enjoyed
success as a recitalist with her thorough scholarship and her ability
to project drama through her voice.
She toured throughout the 1970s, giving recitals of works by Schubert,
Mahler, Wagner, Brahms, Satie,
Messiaen and contemporary American composers. By the mid-1980s she was
one of the most popular and
highly regarded dramatic soprano singers in the world. She produced
numerous award-winning records,
and many of her performances were televised. She holds honorary doctorates
from
Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Edinburgh.

Jessey Norman and Marek Janowski

What makes Jessye Norman great?:
Her large voice - described as "oceanic" or the "dark continent" - has
a range encompassing contralto,
mezzo and high soprano, though she is less free at the top. Always musicianly
and intelligent,
she has a commanding stage presence and an opulent, dark voice capable
of rare subtlety of nuance
and dynamics in phrasing. One cool fact about her career is that in
Tokyo in 1985 she had a 47 minute
ovation and a 55 minute ovation in Salzburg in 1986!

Kathleen Battle
Lyric Soprano

Kathleen Battle's lyric soprano voice and unique artistry have captivated
audiences around the world,
making her one of the most acclaimed singers of her time. Her latest
recording for Sony Classical -
Classic Kathleen Battle - brings together the best of her recent recordings
for the label, embracing a
repertoire that includes opera, Baroque and sacred music, jazz, spirituals
and an excerpt from
Vangelis' Mythodea, released in 2001.
In a repertoire that ranges from Handel to Richard Strauss, the singer
has appeared on the stages
of the world's leading opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera,
the opera houses of Vienna, Paris,
San Francisco and Chicago, and London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Miss Battle has enjoyed
close collaborations with most noted artists of our time and has performed
with the world's great orchestras
in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland
and Los Angeles.
She has also appeared regularly in the festivals of Salzburg, Ravinia,
Tanglewood, Blossom, Hollywood Bowl,
Mann Music Center, Caramoor and Cincinnati's May Festival. In recital,
she has performed extensively
throughout the U.S. and Canada, South America, Europe and Asia, regularly
performing in the music
capitals of the world. A five-time Grammy Award winner, Miss Battle
has made many recordings and television
appearances that have brought her voice and musicianship into millions
of homes worldwide.
Her repertoire embraces jazz and spirituals as well as an uncommonly
wide range of classical music,
from the Baroque to composer André Previn's song cycle Honey and
Rue, commissioned by Carnegie Hall
for Miss Battle, with texts by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.
A native of Portsmouth, Ohio, Kathleen Battle earned both her Bachelor's
and Master's degrees from the
College Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. She made her
professional debut at the Spoleto Festival,
and her Metropolitan Opera debut followed only five years later. Miss
Battle is the recipient of six honorary
doctorates from American universities and, in 1999, was inducted into
the NAACP Image Hall of Fame.

Willard White
Bass-Baritone

Willard White was born in Kingston, Jamaica on October 10, 1946, where
he commenced his musical training at the
Jamaican School of Music and then went on to the Juilliard School in
New York.
Since making his debut with the New York City Opera he has sung in the
Opera Houses of San Francisco,
London – both the Royal Opera, Covent Garden and English National Opera,
Munich, Amsterdam, Geneva,
Hamburg, Madrid, Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels and at the Glyndebourne,
Aix en Provence and Salzburg Festivals.
His performances include Golaud in Pelléas and Mélisande in Amsterdam
and San Francisco, Khovanschina in Brussels, Faust at the Bastille, Nick
Shadow in the Peter Sellars productions of The Rake's Progress and Oedipus Rex at the Chatelet, Mephistopheles
in David Alden's production of La Damnation de Faust, the title-role in Stein Winge's production
of The Flying Dutchman for
English National Opera, Nekrotzar Le Grand Macabre at the Salzburg
Festival and at the Chatelet in Paris,
the title-role Boris Godunov for Welsh National Opera, Nick
Shadow at the Netherlands Opera and Parsifal
at the Bastille. He appeared as the soloist at the Last Night of
the Proms in 1999, Proms in the Park on the
Last night of the Proms in 2000, and in the opening ceremony of the
Millennium Dome in London.
Last season his appearances included the Missa Solemnis with
the Boston Symphony Orchestra under
Seiji Ozawa, the world première of John Adams's opera El Nino
at the Chatelet in Paris,
with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in San Francisco and with
the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester
in Berlin under Kent Nagano, Turandot for the Royal Opera, Covent
Garden, Falstaff at the Aix-en-Provence Festival
and Don Carlos at the Orange Festival.
Willard White's large repertoire includes the bass-baritone roles in
operas by Monteverdi, Handel,
Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Debussy, Shostakovich, Mussorgsky,
Prokofiev and Gershwin.
His regular concert appearances include working with London Symphony
Orchestra,
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra,
La Scala Orchestra,
Berlin Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestras
and he is much in demand as a recitalist.
His concert programme "An Evening with Willard White - a tribute
to Paul Robeson," performed with a small
group of versatile musicians, continues to be a huge success at festivals
throughout the UK and will shortly be
issued on CD. Engagements in the 2001/2 season include Rigoletto
at the Bastille, Kutuzov in the new production
of War and Peace for English National Opera, Parsifal
and Bluebeard's Castle for the Royal Opera,
Covent Garden, the Beethoven Choral Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle, Falstaff at the Théâtre du Champs Elysées, as well as recitals
and concerts throughout Europe and in the U.S.A.
Willard White appeared as Porgy in the television film of Porgy &
Bess and as Shakespeare's Othello
with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and this acclaimed performance was
also filmed for television.
Recordings include oratorios, operas and recitals.
Willard White is one of the world's great basses, known for his enormous
rich voice and powerful stage presence.
Born in Jamaica, he studied in New York, and made his debut with New
York City Opera in 1974 as Colline in 'La Bohème'. He has sung with a number of American and European
opera companies, and in 1976
made his London opera debut with English National Opera as Seneca in
Monteverdi's 'L'Incoronazione di Poppea', having appeared in London earlier
in the same year in 'Porgy and Bess'.
He sang the King in Prokofiev's 'Love for Three Oranges' at Glyndebourne
in 1982.
In many people's minds, his most outstanding role is as Mephistopheles
in 'The Damnation of Faust',
which he has sung many times to memorable effect and with huge acclaim.

Barbara Hendricks
Soprano

Barbara Hendricks is one of the most popular and versatile artists
in the music world today.
Equally at home in opera, recital, jazz and popular song her recordings
have sold all over
the world and received many accolades. She is also a tireless campaigner
for Human Rights
and the importance of her work in this area has been recognized by such
organisations as
the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and UNESCO.
Barbara Hendricks was born in Stephens, Arkansas, USA. She received
her musical training
and her Bachelor of Music at the Juilliard School of Music in New York,
where she studied
with mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel. Earlier, she had completed her studies
at the University
of Nebraska where she received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics
and Chemistry.
Barbara Hendricks made her opera debut with the San Francisco Opera
in Poppea in 1976 and
appeared thereafter with the opera-companies of Boston, Santa Fe, Glyndebourne,
Amsterdam,
Hamburg, Vienna, Munich, Paris, La Scala and Metropolitan Opera. In
1978, she scored a
personal triumph in Berlin as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro in
a new production conducted
by Daniel Barenboim. She later repeated this role in Berlin with Karl
Böhm,
at the Aix-en-Provence Festival with Neville Marriner and in Vienna,
Hamburg and Munich.
Hendricks made her Paris Opera debut in 1982 as Juliette in Roméo
et Juliette,
followed by Nanetta in Falstaff and Mélisande. She also
sang the role of Nanetta
in the co-production of Falstaff staged by the opera companies
of Los Angeles,
London and Florence conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. In 1986 she made
her debut at the
Metropolitan Opera as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier and in 1987
her opera debut at
La Scala as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro conducted by Riccardo
Muti.
Acclaimed as one of the leading recitalists of her generation, Barbara
Hendricks has
appeared at every major music centre in Europe, Japan and North America
and has also
toured extensively in the Soviet Union. Among the accompanists she has
worked with are
Dmitri Alexeev, Daniel Barenboim, Michel Béroff, Radu Lupu, Michel Dalberto,
Andras Schiff,
Peter Serkin and Ralf Gothoni. She has also performed with the leading
orchestras and
conductors of our time: conductors such as Barenboim, Bernstein, Davis,
Dorati, Giulini,
Karajan, Maazel, Marriner, Mehta, Solti, Prêtre, Plasson, Tate, Gardiner
and Haitink.
Hendricks has also performed at many major music festivals such as Salzburg,
Aix-en-Provence,
Dresden, Edinburgh, Florence, Montreux, Orange, Osaka, Prague, Tanglewood
and Vienna.
The first collaboration between EMI Classics and Barbara Hendricks took
place in 1978
with the recording of Verdi's Don Carlo conducted by Karajan.
Other operas for EMI Classics
include the prizewinning recording of Georges Enesco's Oedipe
under Lawrence Foster,
Bizet's Les Pêcheurs des Perles under Michel Plasson, Gluck's
Orphée et Eurydice
(in Berlioz's edition) under John Eliot Gardiner and an appearance as
the Sandman in
Jeffrey Tate's recording of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel.
Her most recent operatic
role on EMI Classics is Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier under Bernard
Haitink.
In choral repertoire she has recorded Orff's Carmina Burana with
the conductor
Franz Welser-Möst, the Bach Magnificat and Vivaldi's Gloria,
both conducted by
Neville Marriner. Gounod's Oratorio/Chronicle, Mors et Vita, with Michel
Plasson,
the Orféon Donostiarra and the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, and
a disc of Operetta
Arias with Lawrence Foster and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Barbara Hendricks has an exclusive contract with EMI France for solo
recordings.
In April 1995 Hendricks released a collection of American songs by two
of the most accessible
and popular of 20th century composers, Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland.
She is joined on
the disc by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson
Thomas.
Other solo releases on EMI Classics include the Strauss Vier letzte
Lieder,
with The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, and
an album of French
melodies, Plaisir d'Amour. In 1996 she released a recording of songs
by Korngold accompanied
by The Philadelphia Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst, and an album
of well-known songs
from the films of Walt Disney. In October 1997 EMI France released an
album entitled,
A Tribute to Jennie Tourel, which features a collection of songs by
Debussy, Dvorak, Liszt,
Rachmaninov and Rossini. More recently her releases have included a
disc of Mozart arias
with Ion Marin and the ECO and an album of South American Music with
the guitarist
Manuel Barrueco, both released in April 1998. In November 1998, EMI
Classics (EMI France)
released an album of negro spirituals with Barbara Hendricks and the
Moses Hogan Choir
entitled Give me Jesus.
Since 1987 Barbara Hendricks has been ceaselessly active in her role
as Goodwill Ambassador
to the United Nations High Commission, visiting refugee camps in Zambia,
Malaysia, Thailand,
Cambodia and Tanzania. Her special concern for the fate of the people
of former Yugoslavia
led her to perform two solidarity concerts in the war-ridden country,
both on December 31st
at midnight. The first, at Dubrovnik in 1991, was organized by the association
A la Première
Heure du Premier Jour (At the first hour of the first day) and the second
in Sarajevo in 1993,
in coordination with the Association for Humanitarian Action, was at
the invitation of the
Sarajevo Orchestra. The concert in Sarajevo presented a formidable challenge
because the city
was under constant siege, bombings and snipers' fire, making it necessary
for Barbara Hendricks
to wear a bullet-proof vest while walking around the city. Barbara Hendricks
is also
Special Advisor on Intercultural Relations for UNESCO, and participates
in the Organisation
of European Youth Campaign against xenophobia, anti-Semetism and intolerance
launched by the
Council of Europe in 1994.
The Association for Humanitarian Action has recently created the International
Tribunal
for Children's Rights of which Barbara Hendricks is a member of the
board of directors.
Its mission is to investigate violations of children's rights recognized
by the International
Convention on the Rights of the Child, to denounce and judge the violators
and to make the
necessary recommendations to end such situations.
In 1986, Barbara Hendricks was given the honour of Commandeur des Arts
et des Lettres by the
French Government, the youngest person ever to receive the honour, and
in 1987 she was
appointed Goodwill Ambassador by the High Commissioner for Refugees
at the United Nations.
In 1988 the Nebraska Wesleyan University honoured her with the title
Doctor of Music:
Hendricks is also a Doctor Honoris Causa of the Nebraska and Louvain
Universities.
In 1990 she was made an Honorary Member of the Institute of Humanitarian
law in San Remo,
Italy, and was awarded a Doctor in Law by the University of Dundee.
In January 1993 Hendricks
was invited by President Bill Clinton to perform at his Inaugural Gala
in Washington DC.
In 1992 she was awarded the Legion d'Honneur by the French President
François Mitterrand,
and in 1996 was asked to sing at the President's memorial service in
Notre Dame, a service
attended by many world leaders and televised worldwide.
She has lived in Europe since 1977, is a Swedish citizen and the proud
mother of a teenage son and daughter.

Robert McFerrin
Singer

Born in Marianna, Arkansas, Robert McFerrin studied at Fisk University
(1940-41), Chicago
Municipal College (1941-42; 1946-48), and Kathryn Turney Long School (1953).
He sang the title role in Rigoletto with the New England Opera Company
(1950), was a baritone
soloist in the Lewisohn Stadium Summer Concert Series (1954), and made
his Metropolitan
Opera debut with the role of Amonasro in Aida (1955). He has been
a guest professor of voice
at Sibelius Academy, Finland (1959) and served as a member of the voice
faculty
at Nelson School of Fine Arts in Nelson, B.C., Canada.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Robert McFerrin

Mattiwilda Dobbs
Coloratura Soprano

One of the world´s most gifted coloratura sopranos is Mattiwilda Dobbs.
Now residing in Sweden
where she is a national favorite, Miss Dobbs has gained international
fame with a voice which has
been described as one "of often miraculous beauty...fascinating ease and
uncanny accuracy."
Born in Atlanta, Georgia on July 11, 1925, Miss Dobbs graduated from Spelman
College in 1946
as class valedictorian, having majored in voice training. After studying
Spanish at Columbia,
where she received her master´s degree, she went to Paris for two years
on a Whitney Fellowship.
In October 1950, competing against hundreds of singers from four continents,
she won the
International Music Competition held at Geneva. She made her professional
debut in Paris,
and then became the first black person to sing a principal role at La
Scala Scala in Milan.
On March 8, 1954, she made her Town Hall debut in New York in the miniature
opera Ariadne auf Naxos,
and received a rousing ovation. A year later, she repeated the success
with her first concert recital
on the same stage. Since then, she has made numerous recordings, including
The Pearl Fishers
and Zaide, and has toured the world with great success. She is
currently
a mainstay in the world of Swedish opera.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Martina Arroyo
Soprano

New York-born soprano Martina Arroyo is today one of a handful of black
divas who have launched
impressive and rewarding careers as operatic and orchestral soloists.
Miss Arroyo made her debut at the Metropolitan in February 1965 in the
title role of Aida and has
already sung engagements with opera houses in Vienna, Berlin, Buenos Aires,
London and Hamburg.
In addition to operatic appearances, she has also been a frequent guest
soloist with many of the
world´s major orchestras. In addition to Aida, Miss Arroyo´s Metropolitan
repertoire includes Donna Anna
in Don Giovanni, Liu in Turandot, Leonora in Il Trovatore,
Elsa in Lohengrin, and
the title role of Madame Butterfly. These have been developed since
1958, the year she made her
debut in Carnegie Hall in the American premiere of Pizzetti´s Murder
in the Cathedral: that same
year she made her Metropolitan debut as the celestial voice in Don
Carlo. On opening night of the
1970-71 Met opera season Miss Arroyo sang Elvira in Ernani and
opened the 1971-72 season
as Elizabeth in Don Carlo.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Martina Arroyo

Reri Grist
Coloratura Soprano

PART I
Reri Grist is today one of America´s most promising coloratura sopranos.
She has already sung
at most of the world´s great opera houses, including La Scala, Vienna
State, and Covent Garden.
Miss Grist first came to national attention in the role of Consuela in
Leonard Bernstein´sWest Side Story, and compounded this success in a performance of
Mahler´s Fourth Symphony with
the New York Philharmonic. When Dr. Herbert Graf, the former stage director
of the Met, left in 1960
to become Director of the Zurich Opera, he persuaded many operatic talents,
including Miss Grist,
to accompany him there. While in Europe, Miss Grist was asked by Stravinsky
to sing under his
baton in Le Rossignol. In July 1964, she made a successful debut
at the renowned
Salzburg Festival in Austria.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Reri Grist

PART II
PERSONAL
Born about 1934 in New York. From childhood performed in musicals. Studied
singing with Claire Gelda;
appeared on Broadway in West Side Story, 1957; opera debut as
Blonde in Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, Santa Fe, 1959;
sang Konigin der Nacht in Die Zauberflote in Cologne and Zurich,
1960; Covent Garden debut in The Golden Cockerel, 1962;
Metropolitan Opera debut as Rosina in Il barere di Sivigliabi,
1966; appeared at Salzburg as Blonde in 1965 and Despina in 1972;
appeared as Adina in L'elisir d'amore, Vienna, 1973.
NARRATIVE ESSAY
Reri Grist is one of several twentieth-century singers (Teresa Stich-Randall
and Rita Streich are others) whose repertory
was based firmly on the operas of Mozart and Richard Strauss. This aspect
of her repertory may be related to the fact that,
like Stich-Randall, Grist is an American singer who spent most of career
singing in German-speaking parts of Europe.
Her voice and stage personality were quite similar to those of her older
contemporary Streich,
with whom she shared much the same repertory.
With her light, high, and focused soprano voice, and her capacity for
impressive flights of coloratura, Grist won applause
as the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Die Zauberflote and Zerbinetta
in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos,
as Despina (Cosi fan tutte) and Sophie (Rosenkavalier).
Comic roles were her speciality: she won audiences
over with her soubrettish wit and lively charm, even after age robbed
her voice of much of its sweetness and warmth.
When she was not singing Mozart or Strauss, Grist gave fine performances
of some of the lighter roles in
nineteenth-century opera. She was praised for both her singing and her
acting in the role of Adina when she sang
in Donizetti's Elisir d'amore at the Metropolitan in 1971. She
was also successful as Oscar in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera
and as Marie in Donizetti's La fille du regiment.
A certain shrillness entered Grist's voice in the 1970s; critics began
to describe her voice as edgy and thin.
Sometimes her performances were marred by a tendency to exaggerate the
playfulness of a role at the expense of vocal quality.
She was criticized in 1972 for her portrayal, in Munich, of Aminta in
Strauss's Die schweigsame Frau. Although
her infectious high spirits won applause, critics found her voice lacking
in the warmth and lyricism that the role demanded.
A recording of Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor with Grist in the role
of Madame Herz shows the singer well past her prime.
Her portrayal of Strauss's Sophie at the Metropolitan in 1978 was criticized
as "hard-edged and brittle." Yet the same year
she was still able to triumph as Despina, a role in which she could
make the most of her talents as a soubrette.
Grist's interpretation of the page Oscar in Ballo in maschera
was applauded in many of the world's leading opera houses.
"Charming"; "boyish"; "bouncy": these are some of the adjectives that
critics used to describe Grist's Oscar. The playful song
"Volta la terrea fronte" in act I of Un ballo in maschera, recorded
in the 1960s under Erich Leinsdorf, shows Grist at her charming best.
Listen to the way she pertly leaps, with perfect accuracy of pitch,
to the high notes at the words "E con Lucifero."
Listen to the subtle change in vocal color as she responds to the chromatic
descending line in the orchestra at the words
"Quando alle belle." Grist's light, detached articulation and bright
vocal color seem to be perfectly in tune with the character of the music.Biography Resource Center
(c)2001, Gale Group, Inc.

George Shirley
Tenor

Tenor George Shirley has sung more than 20 leading roles at the Metropolitan
since his debut
there as Fernando in Cosi Fan Tutte on October 24, 1961.
Shirley, winner of the 1960-61 Metropolitan Opera auditions, was born
April 18, 1934
in Indianapolis, and moved to Detroit in 1940. There he began giving
vocal recitals in churches,
deciding on a musical career after playing baritone horn in the community
band.

Rodolfo: "La Bohème", Milano/Italy 1960

In 1955, he graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit with a
B.S. in musical education.
After his discharge from the Army in 1959, he began serious vocal studies
with Themy S. Georgi.
In June of that year, he made his operatic debut as Eisenstein in Strauss´s
Die Fledermaus,
performing with the Turnau Players in Woodstock. A year later, he won
the American Opera
Auditions, whereupon he journeyed to Milan, Italy, making his opera
debut there in Puccini´sLa Boheme.

Pelléas:
"Pelléas et Mélisande", Covent Garden, London/UK 1969

In 1961, his career was given tremendous impetus by his victory in
the
Metropolitan Opera auditions. Recording, opera, and television engagements
were numerous
that year.

In 1963, he made his debut at Carnegie Hall with the Friends of French
Opera,
singing opposite Rita Gorr in Massenet´s La Navarraise. Since
then, he has sung with several of the
Met´s leading divas, including Renata Tebaldi in Simon Boccanegra
and Birgit Nilsson in Salome.

Loge: "Das Rheingold", Deutsche Oper Berlin, Germany 1987

By now, Shirley has so broadened and refined his repertory that he
is at home in virtually
every major opera culture in Europe. He has made several European tours,
performing with the
leading orchestras on the continent and at the most prestigious opera
houses there.

George Shirley

In 1973 Shirley initiated a radio program on WQXR (N.Y.) entitled Afro-American
Artists in
the Classical Field. In 1974 he sang the title role in Mozart´s
Idomeneo at the Glyndeburne Festival.

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

William Grant Still
Composer

William Grant Still is acclaimed as the "dean of black composers."
He has numerous firsts to his
credit, and his musical inspiration and skills unite both classical
and folk traditions.
Born in Woodville, Mississippi, Still received his early musical training
at home.
He attended Wilberforce University and then studied at the Oberlin Conservatory
of Music
and the New England Conservatory. Work with George W. Chadwick and Edgar
Varese
completed his formal studies. Still´s early work was as an arranger
for jazz orchestras,
but he soon turned to composition, making use of his jazz background
in a more classical
framework. It was the performance of his Afro-American Symphony
in 1931 by the Rochester
Philharmonic under Howard Hanson, that brought him real recognition.
This was the first time
a major orchestra had performed a full-length piece by a black American
composer.
In 1936, Still became the first black to conduct a major American orchestra
when he gave a program
of his own compositions at the Hollywood Bowl. Still wrote seven operas
as well as composing
music for films (Pennies from Heaven). radio, and television
(Perry Mason and Gunsmoke).
His numerous serious works reflect many sides of black life. Stokowski
has called him
"one of our greatest American composers."

Source: The Negro Almanac-A Reference Work on the
Afro American, New York 1976

Professor Akin Euba is the most literary Nigerian scholar, composer,
and performer.
He is one of the world's leading authorities on African musicology with
research work covering areas
of traditional, popular, church and art music from various countries
and ethnic groups in the continent.
He is a trail blazer in the field of modern African art music and his
creative output is extensive.
According to Euba, his scholarly interests include the musicology and
ethnomusicology of modern interculturalism
(in which non-Western ideas are brought into the mainstream of international
practice)
and the methodology that enables the analyst to proceed to synthesis
(creative musicology)
and from synthesis to analysis (auto-musicology). 12 Dec 2003,
by Godwin Sadoh - Ethnomusicologist, organist & composer

Prof. Gayle McKinney Griffith studied at the New York Juilliard School
of Music and Connecticut College (School of Dance). She aspired to a
dance career and subsequently became the first Ballett Mistress and
Soloist in the original Dance Theatre of Harlem. She appeared on world
famous stages such as Carnegie Hall, Sadlers Wells and the Palladium.
As a teacher of different dance techniques, she taught at many schools
and companies. By extending her work to film, television and musicals,
she enriched her knowledge in the entertainment and production field.
Thus, she owns a rich treasure of experience which now finds its expression
through the productions of FOUNTAINHEAD. Currently she specializes in
the training of classical ballet and special body placement.

John Coltrane

Born September 23, 1926 in Hamlet, NC
Died July 17, 1967 in New York, NY
The most influential jazz musician of the past 40 years (only Miles
Davis comes close),
one of the greatest saxophonists of all time and a remarkable innovator,
John Coltrane
certainly made his impact on jazz!
Unlike most musicians, Coltrane's style changed gradually, but steadily
over time.
His career can be divided into at least five periods: Early days (1947-54),
searching stylist (1955-56), sheets of sound (1957-59), the classic
quartet (1960-64)
and avant-garde (1965-67). Originally an altoist, he played in a Navy
band during his period
in the military, recording four privately issued songs in 1946. He settled
in Philadelphia
and then toured with King Kolax (1946-47), switched to tenor when he
played with
Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson (1947-48), joined the Dizzy Gillespie big band
(1948-49) and was
with Dizzy's sextet (1950-51). Radio broadcasts from the latter association
find Coltrane
sounding heavily influenced by Dexter Gordon and hinting slightly at
his future sound.
He followed that gig with periods spent with the groups of Gay Crosse
(1952),
Earl Bostic (1952), Johnny Hodges (1953-54) and in Philadelphia for
a few weeks with
Jimmy Smith (1955). The John Coltrane story really starts with his joining
the Miles Davis
Quintet in 1955. At first some observers wondered what Miles saw in
the 28-year old tenor,
who had an unusual sound and whose ideas sometimes stretched beyond
his technique.
However Davis was a masterful talent scout who could always hear potential
greatness.
Coltrane improved month-by-month and by 1956 was competing with Sonny
Rollins as the top
young tenor; he even battled him to a draw on their recording of "Tenor
Madness."
Coltrane (along with Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones)
formed an important
part of the classic Miles Davis Quintet, recording with Miles for Prestige
and Columbia
during 1955-56. In addition Trane was starting to be featured on many
of Prestige's
jam-session-oriented albums. 1957 was the key year in John Coltrane's
career.
Fired by Miles Davis due to his heroin addiction, Coltrane permanently
kicked the habit.
He spent several months playing with Thelonious Monk's Quartet, an mutually
beneficial
association that gave Monk long-overdue acclaim and greatly accelerated
the tenor's growth.
His playing became even more adventurous than it had been, he recorded
Blue Train
(his first great album as a leader) and, when he rejoined Miles Davis
in early 1958,
Coltrane was unquestionably the most important tenor in jazz. During
his next two years
with Davis, Trane (whose style had been accurately dubbed "sheets of
sound" by critic
Ira Gitler) really took the chordal improvisation of bop to the breaking
point,
playing groups of notes with extreme speed and really tearing into the
music.
In addition to being one of the stars of Davis' recordings (including
Milestones and
Kind of Blue), Coltrane signed a contract with Atlantic and began to
record classics
of his own; "Giant Steps" (with its very complex chord structure) and
"Naima" were among
the many highlights. By 1960 John Coltrane was long overdue to be a
leader and Miles Davis
reluctantly let him go. 'Trane's direction was changing from utilizing
as many chords as
possible (it would be difficult to get any more extreme in that direction)
to playing
passionately over one or two-chord vamps. He hired pianist McCoy Tyner,
drummer Elvin Jones
and went through several bassists (Steve Davis, Art Davis, Reggie Workman)
before settling
on Jimmy Garrison in late 1961. The first artist signed to the new Impulse
label,
Coltrane was given complete freedom to record what he wanted. He had
recently begun doubling
on soprano, bringing an entirely new sound and approach to an instrument
previously associated
with the Dixieland of Sidney Bechet (although Steve Lacy had already
started specializing on it)
and Coltrane's 1960 Atlantic recording of "My Favorite Things" became
a sort of theme song
that he revisited on a nightly basis.
John Coltrane continued to evolve during 1961-64. He added Eric Dolphy
as part of his group
for a period and recorded extensively at the Village Vanguard in late
1961; the lengthy
explorations were branded by conservative critics as "anti-jazz." Partly
to counter their
stereotyping (and short memories), 'Trane recorded with Duke Ellington
in a quartet,
a ballad program and a collaboration with singer Johnny Hartman; his
playing throughout
was quite beautiful. But live in concert his solos (which could be 45
minutes in length)
were always intense and continually searching. He utilized such songs
as "Impressions"
(which used the same two-chord framework as Miles Davis' "So What")
and "Afro Blue" for
long workouts and took stunning cadenzas on the ballad "I Want yo Talk
About You."
In addition to the Impulse! recordings, European radio broadcasts have
since been released
that show Coltrane's progress and consistency. And in December 1964
he displayed his vast
interest in Eastern religion by recording the very popular A Love Supreme.
In 1965 it all began to change. Influenced and inspired by the intense
and atonal flights
of Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, Coltrane's music
dropped most of the
melodies and essentially became passionate sound explorations. Ascension
from mid-year
featured six additional horns (plus a second bassist) added to the quartet
for almost
totally free improvisations. Fast themes (such as "One Down, One Up"
and "Sun Ship")
were quickly disposed of on the way to waves of sound. Coltrane began
to use Pharoah Sanders
in his group to raise the intensity level even more and when he hired
Rashied Ali as second
drummer, it eventually caused McCoy Tyner (who said he could no longer
hear himself)
and Elvin Jones to depart. In 1966 Coltrane had a quintet consisting
of his wife Alice
on piano, Sanders, Ali and the lone holdover Jimmy Garrison. After a
triumphant visit to
Japan, Coltrane's health began to fail. Although the cause of his death
on July 17, 1967
was listed as liver cancer, in reality it was probably overwork. Coltrane
used to practice
ten to twelve hours a day and when he had a job (which featured marathon
solos),
he would often spend his breaks practicing in his dressing room! It
was only through
such singlemindedness that he could reach such a phenominal technical
level, but the net
result was his premature death. Virtually every recording that John
Coltrane made throughout
his career is currently available on CD, quite a few books about him
have been written and a
video (The Coltrane Legacy) gives today's jazz followers an opportunity
to see him performing
on a pair of half-hour television shows. Since Coltrane's passing no
other giant has dominated
jazz on the same level. In fact many other saxophonists have built their
entire careers on
exploring music from just one of John Coltrane's periods! -- Scott Yanow

Katherine Dunham
Choreographer, Dancer

Born in Chicago on June 22, 1909, and raised in Joliet, Illinois,
Katherine Dunham did not
begin formal dance training until her late teens. In Chicago she studied
with
Ludmilla Speranzeva and Mark Turbyfill, and danced her first leading
role in Ruth Page's ballet "La Guiablesse" in 1933. She attended the University of Chicago
on scholarship
(B.A., Social Anthropology, 1936), where she was inspired by the work
of anthropologists
Robert Redfield and Melville Herskovits, who stressed the importance
of the survival of
African culture and ritual in understanding African-American culture.
While in college she
taught youngsters' dance classes and gave recitals in a Chicago storefront,
calling her
student company, founded in 1931, "Ballet Negre." Awarded a Rosenwald
Travel Fellowship in 1936
for her combined expertise in dance and anthropology, she departed after
graduation for the
West Indies (Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, Haiti, Martinique) to do field
research in anthropology
and dance. Combining her two interests, she linked the function and
form of Caribbean dance
and ritual to their African progenitors.
The West Indian experience changed forever the focus of Dunham's life
(eventually she would
live in Haiti half of the time and become a priestess in the "vodoun"
religion), and caused
a profound shift in her career. This initial fieldwork provided the
nucleus for future
researches and began a lifelong involvement with the people and dance
of Haiti.
From this Dunham generated her master's thesis (Northwestern University,
1947) and more
fieldwork. She lectured widely, published numerous articles, and wrote
three books about her
observations: JOURNEY TO ACCOMPONG (1946), THE DANCES OF HAITI (her
master's thesis,
published in 1947), and ISLAND POSSESSED (1969), underscoring how African
religions and rituals
adapted to the New World. And, importantly for the development of modern
dance,
her fieldwork began her investigations into a vocabulary of movement
that would form the core
of the Katherine Dunham Technique. What Dunham gave modern dance was
a coherent lexicon of
African and Caribbean styles of movement -- a flexible torso and spine,
articulated pelvis
and isolation of the limbs, a polyrhythmic strategy of moving -- which
she integrated with
techniques of ballet and modern dance.
When she returned to Chicago in late 1937, Dunham founded the Negro
Dance Group,
a company of black artists dedicated to presenting aspects of African-American
and
African-Caribbean dance. Immediately she began incorporating the dances
she had learned into
her choreography. Invited in 1937 to be part of a notable New York City
concert,
"Negro Dance Evening," she premiered "Haitian Suite," excerpted from
choreography she was
developing for the longer "L'Ag'Ya." In 1937-1938 as dance director
of the Negro Unit of the
Federal Theatre Project in Chicago, she made dances for "Emperor Jones"
and "Run Lil' Chillun,"
and presented her first version of "L'Ag'Ya" on January 27, 1938. Based
on a Martinique
folktale (ag'ya is a Martinique fighting dance), "L'Ag'Ya" is a seminal
work, displaying
Dunham's blend of exciting dance-drama and authentic African-Caribbean
material.
Dunham moved her company to New York City in 1939, where she became
dance director of the
New York Labor Stage, choreographing the labor-union musical "Pins and
Needles."
Simultaneously she was preparing a new production, "Tropics and Le Jazz
Hot: From Haiti to
Harlem." It opened February 18, 1939, in what was intended to be a single
weekend's concert
at the Windsor Theatre in New York City. Its instantaneous success,
however, extended the run
for ten consecutive weekends and catapulted Dunham into the limelight.
In 1940 Dunham and her company appeared in the black Broadway musical,
"Cabin in the Sky,"
staged by George Balanchine, in which Dunham played the sultry siren
Georgia Brown -- a
character related to Dunham's other seductress, "Woman with a Cigar,"
from her solo
"Shore Excursion" in "Tropics." That same year Dunham married John Pratt,
a theatrical
designer who worked with her in 1938 at the Chicago Federal Theatre
Project, and for the
next 47 years, until his death in 1986, Pratt was Dunham's husband and
her artistic
collaborator. With "L'Ag'Ya" and "Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti
to Harlem,"
Dunham revealed her magical mix of dance and theater -- the essence
of "the Dunham touch" -- a
savvy combination of authentic Caribbean dance and rhythms with the
heady spice of American
showbiz. Genuine folk material was presented with lavish costumes, plush
settings, and the
orchestral arrangements based on Caribbean rhythms and folk music. Dancers
moved through
fantastical tropical paradises or artistically designed juke-joints,
while a loose storyline
held together a succession of diverse dances. Dunham aptly called her
spectacles "revues."
She choreographed more than 90 individual dances, and produced five
revues, four of which
played on Broadway and toured worldwide. Her most critically acclaimed
revue was her 1946
"Bal Negre," containing another Dunham dance favorite, "Shango," based
directly on "vodoun"
ritual. If her repertory was diverse, it was also coherent. "Tropics
and le Jazz Hot:
From Haiti to Harlem" incorporated dances from the West Indies as well
as from Cuba and
Mexico, while the "Le Jazz Hot" section featured early black American
social dances,
such as the Juba, Cake Walk, Ballin' the Jack, and Strut. The sequencing
of dances,
the theatrical journey from the tropics to urban black America implied
-- in the most
entertaining terms -- the ethnographic realities of cultural connections.
In her 1943
"Tropical Revue," she recycled material from the 1939 revue and added
new dances,
such as the balletic "Choros" (based on formal Brazilian quadrilles),
and "Rites de Passage,"
which depicted puberty rituals so explicitly sexual that the dance was
banned in Boston.
Beginning in the 1940s, the Katherine Dunham Dance Company appeared
on Broadway and toured
throughout the United States, Mexico, Latin America, and especially
Europe, to enthusiastic
reviews. In Europe Dunham was praised as a dancer and choreographer,
recognized as a serious
anthropologist and scholar, and admired as a glamorous beauty. Among
her achievements was her
resourcefulness in keeping her company going without any government
funding. When short of
money between engagements, Dunham and her troupe played in elegant nightclubs,
such as
Ciro's in Los Angeles. She also supplemented her income through film.
Alone, or with her
company, she appeared in nine Hollywood movies and in several foreign
films between 1941
and 1959, among them CARNIVAL OF RHYTHM (1939), STAR-SPANGLED RHYTHM
(1942),
STORMY WEATHER (1943), CASBAH (1948), BOOTE E RIPOSTA (1950), and MAMBO
(1954).
In 1945 Dunham opened the Dunham School of Dance and Theater (sometimes
called the Dunham
School of Arts and Research) in Manhattan. Although technique classes
were the heart of the
school, they were supplemented by courses in humanities, philosophy,
languages, aesthetics,
drama, and speech. For the next ten years many African-American dances
of the next generation
studied at her school, then passed on Dunham's technique to their students,
situating it in
dance mainstream (teachers such as Syvilla Fort, Talley Beatty, Lavinia
Williams, Walter Nicks,
Hope Clark, Vanoye Aikens, and Carmencita Romero; the Dunham technique
has always been taught
at the Alvin Ailey studios). During the 1940s and '50s, Dunham kept
up her brand of political
activism. Fighting segregation in hotels, restaurants and theaters,
she filed lawsuits and
made public condemnations. In Hollywood, she refused to sign a lucrative
studio contract when
the producer said she would have to replace some of her darker-skinned
company members.
To an enthusiastic but all-white audience in the South, she made an
after-performance speech,
saying she could never play there again until it was integrated. In
São Paulo, Brazil, she
brought a discrimination suit against a hotel, eventually prompting
the president of Brazil
to apologize to her and to pass a law that forbade discrimination in
public places.
In 1951 Dunham premiered "Southland," an hour-long ballet about lynching,
though it was only
performed in Chile and Paris. Toward the end of the 1950s Dunham was
forced to regroup,
disband, and reform her company, according to the exigencies of her
financial and physical
health (she suffered from crippling knee problems). Yet she remained
undeterred.
In 1962 she opened a Broadway production, "Bambouche," featuring 14
dancers, singers, and
musicians of the Royal Troupe of Morocco, along with the Dunham company.
The next year she
choreographed the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "Aida" -- thereby
becoming the
Met's first black choreographer. In 1965-1966, she was cultural adviser
to the President of
Senegal. She attended Senegal's First World Festival of Negro Arts as
a representative from
the United States. Moved by the civil rights struggle and outraged by
deprivations in the
ghettos of East St. Louis, an area she knew from her visiting professorships
at Southern
Illinois University in the 1960s, Dunham decided to take action. In
1967 she opened the
Performing Arts Training Center, a cultural program and school for the
neighborhood children
and youth, with programs in dance, drama, martial arts, and humanities.
Soon thereafter she
expanded the programs to include senior citizens. Then in 1977 she opened
the Katherine Dunham
Museum and Children's Workshop to house her collections of artifacts
from her travels and
research, as well as archival material from her personal life and professional
career.
During the 1980s, Dunham received numerous awards acknowledging her
contributions.
These include the Albert Schweitzer Music Award for a life devoted to
performing arts and
service to humanity (1979); a Kennedy Center Honor's Award (1983); the
Samuel H. Scripps
American Dance Festival Award (1987); induction into the Hall of Fame
of the National Museum
of Dance in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (1987). That same year Dunham directed
the reconstruction
of several of her works by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and
"The Magic of
Katherine Dunham opened Ailey's 1987-1988 season.
In February 1992, at the age of 82, Dunham again became the subject
of international attention
when she began a 47-day fast at her East St. Louis home. Because of
her age, her involvement
with Haiti, and the respect accorded her as an activist and artist,
Dunham became the center
of a movement that coalesced to protest the United States' deportations
of Haitian
boat-refugees fleeing to the U.S. after the military overthrow of Haiti's
democratically
elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. She agreed to end her fast
only after Aristide
visited her and personally requested her to stop.
Boldness has characterized Dunham's life and career. And, although she
was not alone,
Dunham is perhaps the best known and most influential pioneer of black
dance.
Her synthesis of scholarship and theatricality demonstrated, incontrovertibly
and joyously,
that African-American and African-Caribbean styles are related and powerful
components of
dance in America. -- Sally Sommer

Miles Davis

Part I
Miles Davis is more than a jazz musician: he is a cultural icon, known
even to people who can't tell bebop from fusion.
That may seem strange considering that Davis made a career of defying
the expectations of critics and audience alike,
but it is just one more paradox associated with this mercurial artist.
Miles was born in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926. He grew up in East
St. Louis in a middle class family, playing in his
high school band as well as with several local R&B groups. He quickly
became enamored of jazz, particularly the
new sounds being created by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Davis'
father sent him to Julliard to study music, but
Miles didn't spend much time there, dropping out to play with Parker's
quintet from 1946 to 1948. That proved to be a
humbling experience at first, since Miles didn't yet have the chops
to keep up with Parker's breakneck tempos and
chord substitutions. He learned quickly, though, and grew immensely
as a musician during his tenure with Bird.
Next, Miles hooked up with a group of musicians who were doing something
completely different. This group included
J.J. Johnson, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Max Roach.
While all were excellent bop players, they
were developing a style that was less volatile and more relaxed, which
suited Davis' temperment. The arrangements
crafted by Lewis, Mulligan, John Carisi, and Gil Evans added more uniqueness
to the nine-piece group's sound.
Davis became the group's ad-hoc leader, and the classic Birth of the
Cool was the result.
The early 50s were an erratic time for Davis, mostly due to his heroin
addiction, and he was a disappointing
performer during this time. By the middle of the decade, however, he
had cleaned up and formed his first quintet,
comprised of Davis, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly
Joe Jones. This group became very
popular and recorded several essential albums for the Prestige label:
Cookin', Steamin', Workin', and Relaxin'.
When the quintet broke up, Davis spent time collaborating again with
arranger Gil Evans, resulting in great albums
like Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. He finished the decade out
by recording one of the best known jazz
albums of all time, Kind of Blue, with a sextet that included Coltrane,
Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Bill Evans,
Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones.
In the 1960s Davis put together a second quintet, this time utilizing
Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams,
and Ron Carter. The music of this group was more complex, moving through
post-bop modal experimentation and
eventually into some of the group improvisation and open forms of free
jazz. Some of Davis' fans were mystified by
the group's music, but it was uniformly applauded by critics, other
musicians, and avid music fans eager for new sounds.
The group's output has recently been collected in the 6-disc set The
Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, 1965-'68.
As the 1970s beckoned, Miles realized that rock had replaced jazz as
the music of choice for the younger generation.
In order not to be left behind, he began to perform with an electronic
band: electric guitar, electric bass, banks of
electronic keyboards, and even an amplified trumpet. The sound was bubbling,
dark, and dense, and it further
alienated some jazz fans and many critics as well. There was no denying
the power of the music Davis was producing,
however: upon its release in 1970, Bitches Brew sold 400,000 copies,
making it the best-selling jazz album of all time.
The group included Chick Corea, Hancock, John McLaughlin, and others
who went on to become mainstays of the
jazz fusion movement.
Davis continued to perform and record throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
continuing to perform with primarily
electronic groups, often playing organ instead of trumpet, and playing
with his back to the audience.
Some of the minimalist experiments he performed at the close of the
70s foreshadowed the ambient and electronic
music that would become common in the 80s and 90s. Miles died on September
28, 1991, but his music, style,
and collaborators all continue to influence not only jazz music, but
popular culture as well.

Part II
He was known to the general public primarily as a trumpet player. However,
in the world of music he had a great deal
of influence not only as a innovative bandleader but also as a composer.
His music and style were important in the
development of improvisational techniques incorporating modes rather
than standard chord changes.
Miles experiments with modal playing reached its apotheosis in 1959
with his recording of Kind of Blue.
Many of the great improvisers and their ideas within the Davis groups
were nurtured through Miles Davis, as he acted
as inspirational overseer. The music and styles of Miles Davis from
one period of his life to the next varied quite
differently. He has composed many tunes that today are considered standard
repertoire for aspiring jazz musicians.
Tunes such as Nardis, Milestones, and So What are typical examples.
Miles Davis had an uncanny ability of always
selecting great sidemen for his recording sessions. These recordings
are full of original and creative sensitivity and
are outstanding examples of jazz recordings made at that time.
His popularity was so great that he mistakenly received composer credit
for a number of modern jazz standards such
as Blue in Green (by Bill Evans) Tune Up and Four (by Eddie Vinson).
His creative and innovative approach to performing such great standards
as Bye Bye Blackbird and On Green Dolphin
Street has resulted in these tunes becoming great jazz standards. Considered
one of the all time great melodic
soloists of our time, Miles Davis can be characterized as having unusual
and very skillful timing with simple or
complex melodic phrases. As were his counter parts, Thelonious Monk
Count Basie, Miles was a true master of
restraint with regard to the creative process of his improvised lines.
His recording in 1954 of The Man I Love with Milt Jackson and Thelonious
Monk and Bags Grove are typical
examples of his inner ability of restraint with regard to phrasing and
time. Other dramatic technique Miles used was
his placement of notes and the use of silence during his solos. Known
in the 1950s for his ability to vary the color of
his sound, pitch, and the use of a Harmon mute, Miles solos resulted
in a warm, rich, wispy, and even intimate
improvisation. Examples are Seven Steps to Heaven and Kind of Blue,
and today are part of every jazz musicians
repertoire. Late in the 1960s Miles began to play more in the upper
register.
Listen to Miles recordings in 1963 of Miles In Europe and Four and More
(1964). In 1969 facing swirling social and
musical currents, Miles incorporated the use of electronic instruments
into his music. Using harsh dissonance's
sounds from electronic instruments he changed the way music of the time
was performed and understood.
If you listen to his recordings in 1970 you notice his more explosive
and violent style with long burst, shattered tones,
electronic echoes, and numerous other alterations on his trumpet. Listen
to Live -Evil and Bitches Brew.
Although Miles Davis does not seem to play as fast or as high as other
trumpet players such as, Maynard Ferguson,
Dizzy Gillespie, or Clifford Brown, he always maintained a constant
momentum at any tempo. The fact that Davis
may or may not have been as technical as other trumpet players, still
does not detract from the fact that his lines
are more varied and original than any other trumpeter of his time.
It should be mentioned that Miles Davis is also considered a great artistic
painter. In 1988 he created a series of
abstract paintings. He was inspired by a Milan -based design movement
known as "Memphis" founded by
Ettore Sottsass. Known for "hot colors" and "clashing shapes" Memphis
mixed and matched a variety of historical
motifs and closely resembled a "postmodernism" style. Miles found this
style appealing and created a large quantity
of paintings. Most of the time Miles appeared on-stage in bright colored
clothing that matched his painting style.
He always seemed to dazzle his audiences with the color of sound that
emanated from his horn and from his
clothing. His paintings in New York City (1990) received enthusiastic
reviews,
as they did in Spain, West Germany and Japan.
Davis had a great artistic gift for painting and creating music. He
is one of the very few jazz musicians of our time
who had the ability to improvise and swing at a constant tempo. When
Miles played a tune it became part of his
soul and it never lost character. He passed away September 28, 1991
and he will be deeply missed.
His music and influence in the world of jazz and art will remain with
us for eternity.(c) 2001 Miles Davis Properties, LLC and The Estate
of Miles Davis

Wynton Marsalis
Composer - Musician

Wynton Marsalis is the most accomplished and acclaimed jazz artist
and composer of his generation, in addition to
being a distinguished classical musician. Mr. Marsalis has helped propel
jazz to the forefront of American culture
through his brilliant performances, recordings, compositions, educational
efforts, and his vision as Artistic Director
of the world-renowned arts organization Jazz at Lincoln Center (J@LC).
Mr. Marsalis's prominent position in the performing arts was secured
in April 1997, when he became the first jazz
artist to be awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in music for his
work Blood on the Fields, commissioned by J@LC.
Born near New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1961, Mr. Marsalis
began his classical training on trumpet at
age 12 and gained experience as a young musician in local marching bands,
jazz and funk bands, and classical
youth orchestras. He entered The Juilliard School in 1979 when he was
17 years old and soon became recognized
as the most impressive trumpeter at the prestigious conservatory. That
year he also joined Art Blakey and the
Jazz Messengers, the acclaimed band in which generations of emerging
jazz artists honed their craft.
Mr. Marsalis made his recording debut as a leader in 1982 and over the
last two decades he has produced an
incomparable catalogue of close to 40 outstanding jazz and classical
recordings for Columbia Jazz and Sony
Classical, which have won him nine Grammy Awards. In 1983 he became
the first and only artist to win both
classical and jazz Grammy Awards in one year and, remarkably, repeated
this feat in 1984.
In 1999, he released 8 new recordings in his unprecedented "Swinging
into the 21st" series, which included a
seven-CD boxed set of live performances from the Village Vanguard.
Mr. Marsalis is the Music Director of the world-renowned Lincoln Center
Jazz Orchestra (LCJO),
which spends over half the year on tour. Mr. Marsalis also devotes a
significant amount of time to composing
new works, many of which are commissioned from and premiered by J@LC.
Mr. Marsalis's rich body of work
includes Them Twos, from the second collaboration between J@LC and the
New York City Ballet in 1999;
Big Train, commissioned and premiered in 1998 by J@LC; Sweet Release,
a score for ballet written in 1996 for
the LCJO and choreographed by Judith Jamison for the Alvin Ailey American
Dance Theater; At the Octoroon Balls,
a 1995 piece performed by the Orion String Quartet with The Chamber
Music Society of Lincoln Center;
Jazz: Six Syncopated Movements, from the 1993 J@LC collaboration with
the New York City Ballet; Jump Start,
a score written for the noted dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp;
Citi Movement/Griot New York,
a three-movement composition scored for jazz septet created in collaboration
with choreographer Garth Fagan;
and In This House, On This Morning, an extended piece based on the form
of a traditional gospel service,
commissioned and premiered by J@LC in 1992. His latest work, All Rise,
is an evening-length twelve-part
composition that was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic
with the LCJO and the
Morgan State University Choir in December 1999, and released on CD in
September 2002.
Mr. Marsalis is internationally respected as a teacher and spokesman
for music education, having received
honorary doctorates from more than a dozen universities and colleges.
Through J@LC education programs,
he regularly conducts master classes, lectures, and concerts for students
of all ages, including the popular J@LC
Jazz for Young PeopleSM concerts. He has also been featured in the TV
production of Marsalis on Music
for the Public Broadcasting System and the series Making the Music for
National Public Radio, which won a
Peabody Award in 1996. Mr. Marsalis has also written a companion book
for the PBS series, as well as
Sweet Swing Blues on the Road, a collaboration with J@LC photographer
Frank Stewart.
Mr. Marsalis was named one of "America's 25 Most Influential People"
by Time magazine and one of "The 50 Most
Influential Boomers" by Life magazine in recognition of his critical
role in stimulating an increased awareness of
jazz in the consciousness of an entire generation of jazz fans and artists.
In March 2001, Mr. Marsalis was
awarded the United Nations designation of "Messenger of Peace" by UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
and in June 2002, received the Congressional "Horizon Award."

Tania Leon
Composer/Conductor/Music Director

"My chosen purpose in life is to be a musician, a composer, a conductor.
This is the way I am making my contribution to mankind."

A multi-faceted musician, Tania León is an international figure in
the music world. She has carved a niche for
herself in contemporary music as a composer, conductor, and music director,
in the process receiving numerous
commissions and awards. Tania León "has distinguished herself as a proponent
of music without category
beyond a standard of excellence," remarked long-time music commentator
Howard Mandel in an article for
Ear Magazine. "Her enthusiasm for contemporary composers regardless
of gender, race, or national origin indicates
an all-embracing worldview as befits a warm, lively woman who accepts
no imposed limits to her own activity."

Spends Early Years in Cuba
The daughter of Oscar León Mederos and Dora Ferran, León was born in
Havana, Cuba, on May 14, 1943,
of a mixed ethnic background. Her ancestors hailed from China, Nigeria,
France, and Spain.
In Havana León studied piano, violin, and music theory, earning multiple
bachelors degrees and a
masters degree in music from the Carlos Alfredo Peyrellado Conservatory.
While still a student she wrote
her first compositions - boleros, bossa novas, and popular music. From
1964 to 1967 León performed as
a piano soloist in her native country and acted as music director for
a television station in Havana.
León immigrated to New York City in 1967. Two years later, she accidentally
met Arthur Mitchell, who asked her to
accompany on piano, his new dance troupe - Dance Theater of Harlem.
León improvised music to fulfill Mitchell's
rehearsal needs, and before long Mitchell offered León the music directorship
of the troupe, a position she held
until 1980. In addition to her artistic managerial activities, León
began composing works for the troupe,
such as Tones, which she and Mitchell collaborated on in 1970. The ballets
The Beloved and Dougla quickly followed.
Dougla, in particular, met with success, becoming a regular part of
the repertoire of European dance companies.

Takes Up the Baton
Although composing was well within the realm of imagination for León,
at the time there were no women conductors,
so she did not consider conducting a viable career choice. "Women conducting
a symphony orchestra? Taboo.
It was completely unheard of," León recalled to Mandel. "It never crossed
my mind." Yet when the Dance Theater
of Harlem performed at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy,
in 1971, León was unexpectedly given the
opportunity to conduct the Julliard Orchestra, which was accompanying
the troupe. "I was encouraged by
Arthur Mitchell and Gian-Carlo Menotti to work with the orchestra,"
reminisced León to Anne Lundy in the
Black Perspective in Music. "They encouraged me to do that, and I had
never done it in my life. It was my very
first time, but I picked up the baton, and I conducted the performance."
Upon returning to the United States, León began to study conducting
formally with Laszlo Halasz, one of the founders
of the New York City Opera. Encouraged, she enrolled at the Julliard
School of Music to study with Vincent LaSilva.
While working with the Dance Theater, León earned a bachelor's degree
in music and then a master's degree in
composition from New York University. Three years later, León studied
at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood
with many guest conductors, among them the world famous Leonard Bernstein
and Seiji Ozawa.
León's conducting activities extended far beyond the Dance Theater.
At the invitation of composer-conductor
Lukas Foss, she founded the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert
Series in 1977, which she conducted for the
next 11 years. León also served as the music director-conductor of the
1978 Broadway production of The Wiz
and the Dance in America series for public television. In 1979 she directed
Robert Wilson's Death, Destruction,
and Detroit, and several years later she composed and directed the
music for the plays Maggie Magalita
and The Golden Window. After leaving her position with the Dance Theater,
León appeared as a guest conductor
at venues in the United States and Puerto Rico. León saw this as a pioneering
time for her, and she faced
problems "like any pioneer would," she told Ebony. "It's not common
for a woman of my skin color to conduct serious
music, so I have to know the score inside out, or work twice as hard
as male conductors."

Finds Musical Voice
In the mid-1980s, León began to express her diverse musical background
in her compositions. She assimilated
gospel and jazz, as well as Latin American and African elements into
pieces, creating a highly rhythmic and
colorful signature sound. For example, in Carabali, a piece for orchestra,
León employed rhythms and improvisation
from Cuban jazz, in a far-ranging blend of tonal colors and rhythmic
patterns. Explaining that the Carabali are
Africans who fought off slave traders to become known as an indomitable
people, León described in Peer-Southern
Concert Music the piece named Carabali as "a symbol of a spirit that
cannot be broken." León added,
"I have tried to convey such an image by creating a body of sounds propelled
by a persistent rhythmic language."
Upon the premier of the work, a reviewer for the Cincinnati Enquirer
remarked, "Highly intellectual, and a demanding
piece for both orchestra and conductor, Carabali is both accessible
and powerful."
León's compositions garnered praise and soon earned her recognition
as a new voice in the music world.
In 1985 she was awarded a residency at the Lincoln Center Institute
in New York City and won the Dean Dixon
Conducting Award. She also joined the composition faculty of the Brooklyn
College Conservatory,
where she was made full professor in 1994.
In the 1990s, León hit her stride, with a steady stream of residencies,
guest conducting appearances, and
commissions for new pieces. In the fall of 1992, she conducted the Johannesburg
Symphony during the
Dance Theater of Harlem's historic trip to South Africa, when the company
became the first multi-racial arts group
to perform and teach there in modern times. León has been invited to
appear as a guest conductor-composer
at Harvard University, Yale University, the Cleveland Institute, the
Ravinia Festival in Chicago, the Bellagio Center
in Italy, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and the Beethovenhalle Orchestra
in Germany, and elsewhere.
In 1993 León accepted a three-year appointment as Revson Composer Fellow
for the New York Philharmonic.
Her responsibilities included advising conductor Kurt Masur on contemporary
music, which she believes puts off
many potential listeners. The antidote, according to León, is using
orchestras in community outreach; otherwise,
audiences for classical music will continue to dwindle, seriously threatening
its existence.
"An orchestra, for me, is an educational institution, and each orchestra
member is a specialist,
as well as a teacher," León explained in the I.S.A.M. Newsletter (Institute
for Studies in American Music).
"It is terribly important that we walk constantly into schools and community
centers to offer master classes
that expose our youngsters to the art of music." "If all of us, players,
conductors, administrators reassess our
priorities and devote some time to community work, we will take important
steps toward rebuilding our image
and our audiences," she added. León has long put her words into action,
beginning with the Brooklyn Philharmonic
Community Concert Series in the late 1970s and extending to the master
classes
she taught at the Hamburg Musikschule in Germany in 1995.

Starts Latin American Music Festival
León also acts as artistic director for the concert series on Latin
American music sponsored by the
American Composers Orchestra (ACO). She cited a historical precedent
for the series in the interest by
North Americans in Latin American music during the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s. However, this interest fizzled
out in the 1960s with the heightening of North-South political tensions.
León would like to see the interest in
Latin American works rekindled. She was instrumental in organizing the
American Composers Orchestra's Sonidos
de las Americas - Sounds of the Americas - festival, which first took
place in February of 1994 in New York City.
As early as 1991, she and ACO Managing Director Jesse Rosen traveled
to Central and South America to
search out new sounds. "We met with composers, with leaders in contemporary
music in Venezuela, Brazil,
Argentina, and Mexico," León recounted to Octavio Roca of Symphony Magazine.
"The first thing we realized
is just how much is out there - and how rich the variety." With such
diverse music available, León and Rosen
decided to focus the first annual festival on the music of Mexico. By
festival time, they had organized,
with the help of the Mexican Cultural Institute and the cooperation
of Carnegie Hall, concerts, symposia,
and master classes dealing with the works of Mexican composers. Calling
the festival "long overdue,"
León voiced her aspirations to Roca. "Maybe in future years more orchestras
can model programs after this one,
and we will have a new movement of interconnections between countries,
so that whole communities of composers
can be known. Now that the door is open, this program can continue."
León plans for future festivals to spotlight
the music of other Latin American countries.
León's composing process seems to mirror her life in its complexity.
Like all creative activity, composing is a
process of bringing together disparate elements to create a whole. "My
ideas have to do with my present,"
León told a Symphony Magazine reporter. "They come when I least expect
it, in the street, sitting at home, in the car.
Ideas start tapping in anywhere, anytime. They wake me up and all of
a sudden I'm hearing an entire orchestra
playing something." The composer keeps a notebook available to jot down
her ideas as they come.
She can be inspired by such varied events as a visit to a museum or
getting stuck in a traffic jam.
León collects these varied musical ideas, which she crafts into a commissioned
work based on the parameters
of the piece. She prefers to work on a single composition at a time.
One commission seemed so daunting at first that León almost turned it
down — an opera. "When I had the invitation
to write an opera, I almost slammed down the telephone. I just couldn't
deal with it," the composer was quoted as
saying in the I.S.A.M. Newsletter. Fortunately León reconsidered, for
the award-winning Scourge of Hyacinths
was the result. Adapted from a radio play by Nobel Prize-winning dramatist
Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, the opera
deals with the plight of three political prisoners in an unnamed dictatorship.
The fate of the prisoners is linked
to a goddess of the native Yoruban religion, the music of which León
remembered from her childhood.
The hyacinths represent corruption and literally and figuratively prevent
the protagonists from escaping their
horrible fate. The opera's 12 quick scenes play continuously, with León's
lightly orchestrated and highly rhythmic
music propelling the action. León herself conducted the premier performances
in Munich, Germany, in May of 1994.
For Scourge of Hyacinths, she won the BMW Prize for Best Composition
at the Munich Biennale for
New Music Theater. In 1999, the opera will be co- produced by the Grand
Théâtre de Genève and the
Opéra de Nancy et de Lorraine, with León conducting. Also, the Dortmund
Opera has commissioned a new opera
from León based on a short story by Isabel Allende. Her other recent
commissions include a major multi-media
work entitled Drummin, which premiered in November of 1997 at the Lincoln
Theatre in Miami;
Sol de Doce for the men's vocal ensemble Chanticleer, with poetry by
Pedro Mir; Singing Sepia, a song cycle
in collaboration with poet Rita Dove for the chamber ensemble Continuum;
Para Viola y Orquesta, premiered
by a consortium of four U.S. orchestras; and Hechizos (Spells), commissioned
and premiered by Frankfurt's
Ensemble Modern in March 1995.

Receives Numerous Awards
Winning prizes is nothing new for León. She has received awards for
her compositions from
Chamber Music America, Readers' Digest, ASCAP, Cintas, Meet the Composer,
and Women of Hope.
She has also been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Copland Fund, Rockefeller
Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which have
allowed for recordings to be made of
her works. Indigena, a compact disc of León's chamber music was released
on the CRI label. A compact disc
that includes Bata and Carabali is available from the Louisville Orchestra's
First Edition Records.
Other pieces can be found on the Albany Records, Newport Classic, Leonarda,
and Mode labels.
Considering herself a global citizen, León does not like to be categorized
by race or gender.
"I have come to a place where I have no citizenship and I have a global
consciousness," she once told
Ear Magazine. And as a global citizen, she desires to bridge the gap
between Latin American and European music,
a lofty- some would say impossible - aspiration. Yet León is not easily
deterred from pursuing her goals.
"My chosen purpose in life is to be a musician, a composer, a conductor,"
she told Lundy. "This is the way I am
making my contribution to mankind" and for these contributions, she
wishes to be judged.

INTRODUCTION
Andre Watts is the first African-American concert pianist to achieve
international superstardom.
Critics have called Watts electrifying, sensational, daring, colorful,
imaginative, powerful, and a supervirtuoso.
One of today's celebrated superstars, Watts burst on the Philadelphia
music scene at age nine and the world music scene at age 16.
He has subsequently performed all over the globe, always receiving rave
reviews.
Born June 20, 1946, in Nuremburg, Germany, the son of an African American
career soldier, sergeant Herman Watts,
and a Hungarian mother, Maria Alexandra Gusmits, Watts lived in Europe,
mostly near army posts, until the age of eight.
A change in his father's military assignment caused the family to move
to the United States and settle in Philadelphia.NARRATIVE ESSAY
The family unit remained intact until 1962, when Herman and Maria were
divorced. Maria Watts insists
that it was not a question of the husband deserting the family. Andre
remained with his mother, whom he credits
with considerable influence in his development. In an interview for
the New York Times Magazine, Watts described
his mother as " a very sharp woman. She never tells me that my performances
are unqualified successes,
always picks out some obscure passage that needs polishing." Maria Watts
worked to support herself and young Andre,
first as a secretary and later as a receptionist in an art gallery.
Watts began studying the violin at age four. By the time he was six
he made it known that his preference was for the piano,
so his mother, a pianist herself, gave him his first lessons. As is
frequently the case, he loved to play, but hated to practice.
When his habit persisted, his mother began relaying stories of her countryman,
pianist and composer Franz Liszt,
emphasizing the fact that he practiced faithfully. Liszt soon became
Watts's hero, and he even adopted Liszt's
bravura playing style. In Philadelphia, Watts went first to a Quaker
school, then to a parochial one, then to Lincoln Preparatory School.
He was also enrolled at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, where he
studied with Genia Robinor, Doris Bawden,
and Clement Petrillo, graduating in June 1963. It is said that with
his huge hands, he always painted in full colors.
Watts entered his first competition at age nine, competing with 40 other
gifted youngsters for an opportunity to appear
in one of the Philadelphia Orchestra's Children's Concerts. Watts won
the competition and with this accomplishment successfully
launched his career. He performed a Franz Joseph Haydn piano concerto.
At age ten, he performed the Felix Mendelssohn G minor
concerto with the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra and at 14, Cesar Franck's
Symphonic Variations, again with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
When Watts was 16, he auditioned at Carnegie Recital Hall before three
New York Philharmonic assistant conductors and
Leonard Bernstein's secretary. The group applauded his audition performance,
moving him on to the maestro
himself--Bernstein--and the finals, where things went equally well.
Watts had little awareness of what this event could make possible.
Watts recalled the experience several years later for journalist Norman
Schreiber, Watts said: Hey my teacher was there;
my mother was there; they were going to be really bummed out if I played
like a pig. I would feel miserable. I also realized it
would be good for you if other people like your playing. Watts played
Liszt's E-flat Concerto at Lincoln Center with the
New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. A Young People's
Concert, the program was taped three days earlier
than it was shown on CBS television on January 15, 1963. Bernstein introduced
the young pianist to the national audience.
Less than three weeks after he was soloist for the Young People's Concert,
Bernstein asked Watts to substitute for an ailing
Glenn Gould, who was the scheduled soloist for the New York Philharmonic's
regular subscription concert on January 1, 1963.
Again Watts performed the Liszt E flat Concerto. So spectacular
was this performance that he made international headlines
and Columbia recorded an LP entitled, The Exciting Debut of Andre Watts.
Time magazine quoted the liner notes: ... Andre approached
the piece as a tone poem. In scherzo passages, he had the speed and
power necessary to dignify his delicately poetic ideas
of the slow pianissimos. His singing tone stayed with him in every mood
of his varied approach, and when he had sounded his
final cadenza, the whole orchestra stood with the audience to applaud
him.
Even the Philharmonic fiddlers put down their bows and gustily clapped
hands.ENTERS CONCERT LIFE
Following his debut, Watts's manager restricted him to a limited number
of engagements: the first year, six concerts;
the next, 12 concerts; the next 15 concerts, and so on. His mother and
manager, decided that his entry into concert life
would be gradual. In addition, success would not isolate him from his
classmates. His English and American history instructor,
Roy Cusumano wrote in International Musician, "he became friendlier
and more responsive." Gradually the number of concerts
increased, reaching 150 by the mid-1970s. By then Watts was performing
about eight months out of the year. In the late 1990s,
he fulfilled roughly 100 engagements per year, divided between concert
appearances and solo recitals.
Though he attained celebrity status at an early age, Watts continued
to study with the noted pianist and teacher Leon Fleisher.
Following high school graduation, Watts began to study part-time for
a bachelor of music degree at Peabody Institute in Baltimore,
where Fleisher was a member of the faculty. He graduated in 1972.
In July 1963, Watts appeared at New York City's Lewisohn Stadium with
Seiji Ozawa and the New York Philharmonic,
performing Camille Saint-Saen's Concert No. 2 in G minor. In
September 1963, he again performed the Liszt concerto
at the Hollywood Bowl. He opened the 1964--65 National Symphony Orchestra's
season in Washington, D.C., performing the
Saint-Saens concerto. He returned to New York in January 1965 to perform
Chopin's Concerto No. 2 in F minor with the Philharmonic.
Watts made his European debut in a London performance with the London
Symphony Orchestra in June 1966.
Shortly thereafter he appeared with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam,
Holland. In October of the same year,
he made his New York recital debut, opening the Great Performers Series
at Philharmonic Hall. He made his debut in Berlin, Germany,
also in 1966, when he performed with the Berlin Philharmonic under the
leadership of Zubin Mehta.
Watts embarked on a three-month world concert tour beginning in September
of 1967,
under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State.
He celebrated his twenty-first birthday by signing a long-term exclusive
contract with CBS Records.
By 1969 he was on a full-scale concert schedule, booked three seasons
in advance.MAKES PUBLIC IMPACT ON TELEVISION
Anniversaries were becoming more and more frequent. Though only 30 at
the time, he celebrated his tenth consecutive
appearance in Lincoln Center's Great Performance Series at Avery Fischer
Hall in 1976. Since he was the first classical
artist to make his initial public impact through television, the producers
believed that his should be the first solo recital
televised live in its entirety from Lincoln Center. Watts's relationship
with television in the field of classical music is unique.
His PBS Sunday afternoon telecast in 1976 was the first solo recital
presented on Live from Lincoln Center and the
first full-length recital to be aired nationally in prime time. The
1988--89 season offered a televised concert featuring the
Shostakovich First Piano Concerto, performed with the Philadelphia
Orchestra, with Watts doubling as piano soloist and program host.
In June and July 1974 he made a five-week tour of Japan and made summer
appearances at the Hollywood Bowl, Ambler,
Ravinia, and Concord festivals. Between recitals and orchestral appearances
throughout the United States, there were two
European tours during the 1975--76 season. Unlike many other proteges,
Watts lived up to his early promise and was a greater
sensation as time moved on. A 1975 press release from the Judd Concert
Bureau described Watts as: Serious-minded and
worldwise...Watts dresses conservatively and comes on rather like a
mature college professor as he talks soberly of the artist's
responsibilities to society. He is not for the gimmick of any kind,
plays his programs straight and shies away from publicity not
specifically related to his metier. ...
Watts decribed the playing experience to James Conaway of the New York
Times: My greatest satisfaction is performing.
The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way
of being part of humanity--of sharing. I don't want to play
for a few people, I want to play for thousands. ... There's something
beautiful about having an entire audience hanging on
a single note. I'd rather have a standing ovation than have some chick
come backstage and tell me how great I was.
In 1964 the National Academy of Recording Artists and Sciences presented
Watts with a Grammy Award and in February 1973
he was selected as Musical America's Musician of the Month. Other honors
and awards include honorary doctorates from
Albright College and Yale University, the Order of the Zaire from that
African country, and a University of the Arts Medal from the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Still in great demand after performing more than 30 years, Watts was
asked by Mark Adams for the Washington Post
about the 1991 winner of the Naumberg Piano Competition, "a black whiz
kid with dreadlocks named Awadagin Pratt."
Watts's response was, "This is not an unfillable position." Thirty-three
years after his first recording, 1995 and 1996 reviewers
still raved over Watts's performances of Tchiakovsky's Piano Concert
No. 1, Saint-Saens's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the
Atlanta Symphony, MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2, and Liszt's
Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 with the Dallas Symphony.
At age 50, Watts remains one of the world's "greatest in demand" pianists,
both as recitalist and concert soloist.
He continues to perform on the world's most important concert stages
and with the world's most celebrated orchestras and conductors.SOURCES:
* Conaway, James. "Andre Watts on Andre Watts." New York Times Magazine
(19 September 1971): 14--26.
* "Concert: Andre Watts Plays Mozart." New York Times, August 13, 1987.
* Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968.
* Cusumano, Roy. "The Prep School Days of Andre Watts." International
Musician (April 1969): 5, 21.
* The Exciting Debut of Andre Watts. Liner Notes, Columbia Records 1963,
MSS 64458.
* Hiemenz, Jack. "Musician of the Month, Andre Watts." Musical America
23 (February 1973): 4--5.
* Press Material, Judd Concert Bureau, 1975.
* Schreiber, Norman. "My Lunch with Andre." Amtrak Express (April/May
1989): 20--24.
* Southern, Eileen. Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African
Musicians. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.
* "Watts Plays for the Millions." New York Times, November 26, 1976.
* "Watts's Incidental Achievement." Washington Post, April 16, 1993.
Biography Resource Center
(c)2001, Gale Group, Inc.

Betty Lou Allen
Mezzo Soprano

Born in Campbell, Ohio, Betty Lou Allen studied at Wilberforce University
and toured with Leontyne Price
as the Wilberforce Sisters. She continued her musical studies at the
Hartford School of Music (1950) and
the Berkshire Music Center (1951), and studied voice with Sarah Peck
Moore, Paul Ulanowsky, and
Zinka Milanov. Her New York debut was in Virgil Thompson's Four Saints
in Three Acts with the
New York City Opera Company (1953) and her formal opera debut was at
the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires (1964).
She has been a soloist with major symphonies on many tours as well as
in Bernstein's Jeremiah Symphony.
She opened the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Concert Hall (1971) and
has recently appeared with the Sante Fe
and Washington opera companies.

Dean Dixon
conductor

Dean Dixon was fond of saying that as his career progressed he was
first called the American Negro conductor, Dean Dixon,
then the American conductor, Dean Dixon, and then as the conductor,
Dean Dixon.
He felt he'd reach his zenith when he was referred to as simply Dean
Dixon.
Born in 1915 in New York City, he never epitomized the American Conductor
nor Negro Conductor as he was stylistically
similar to Northern European conductors having conducted the Groteberg
Symphony Orchestra in Sweden from 1953 to 1960
and the Hess Radio Symphony Orchestra at Frankfurt as Main Conductor
from 1961 until 1970.
After conducting with Stoesel at the Julliard School and graduating
from Columbia University,
he formed an orchestra in New York in 1932. In 1941, he led the New
York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra as the first
African American conductor. In the following years, he also guest conducted
the Philadelphia and Boston Symphony Orchestras.
He left the United States in 1949 for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
and conducted during the 1950 and 1951 seasons.
Dixon Traveled to Australia in 1964 to become the principal conductor
of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra until 1967.
Dixon is noted for his recordings of 20th Century American Composers
-- including Cowell's Symphony No. 5, McDowell's Indian Suite,
Moore's Symphony No. 2, among others -- on the American Recording
Society label. Yet, he remained rooted in the European Classics
and recorded some of his best discs for Westminster -- notably the Dvorak
Cello Concerto with Janigro and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra
and Schubert's Symphonies 4 and 5 with the London Philharmonic
Symphony Orchestra.
In 1976, the world lost a great conductor and distinguished man in the
death of Dean Dixon. Copyright 1998 Susan Murray

Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Pianist

PART I
Born in New Orleans in 1829, Louis Moreau Gottschalk grew up in a neighbourhood
where he was exposed to Creole music
with its African-Caribbean rhythms and the melodious folk songs that
would later become a characteristic ingredient of
much of his music. The house where he was born still stands at the southwest
corner of Esplanade and Royal streets
in New Orleans, and it was from this rather unassuming place that his
brilliant career started --
a career that would eventually spur him on to international fame.
Some of his past biographers have taken the idea of his childhood home
as the "geographical centre" of his musical
inspiration quite literally. Vernon Loggins, for example, describes
vividly how young Gottschalk would listen to the music
that filled the streets of New Orleans in the 1830s at many of the ubiquitous
Sunday afternoon public dances
held by slaves across the city. Loggins even paints the picture of Gottschalk
dancing on the third-floor gallery of his
home on Rampart street where he lived with his parents from 1831-1833:
"Always at that hour [he] was up on the third-floor
gallery listening for the first sound of the drums. As soon as the beats
fell into a steady rhythm he began to march.
Louder and faster the beats grew, and the boy's march turned into a
dance. . . As the hundreds of (dancers) sang,
the dancing boy sang too. Over and over he would repeat the melody,
until his mother would come, pick him up, carry him
into the nursery, and lay him on his bed. In an instant he would be
sound asleep."
The general musical climate of New Orleans may have played its role
during Gottschalk´s childhood, but is seems unlikely that
little Louis-Moreau, at age two, picked up his extensive knowledge of
Creole music by dancing on the gallery to the sounds
of Sunday afternoon dances, or, as his biographer S. Frederick Starr
puts it, "by hanging on the fence of Congo square as
a spectator" (Congo Square with its many musical gatherings being, at
the time, the major dissemination point for West Indian
and Afro-American culture in New Orleans). Rather, he was exposed to
the music also within the household; via his Grandmother
Buslé and his nurse Sally, both of whom were natives of Saint-Domingue.
However, none of this is to suggest that Gottschalk´s later work was
derivative: When he borrowed from traditional sources
he did so openly and acknowledged his sources, and at any rate such
occasional "quotations" are outweighed by his playful
inventiveness and creativity. An example of this is his informal début
at the (then) new St. Charles Hotel in 1840, at a time when
despite his numerous recitals in salons of wealthy New Orleans households
he had not yet performed in public concerts.
The programme described Gottschalk as "a young Creole" and his début
already foreshadowed his later work:
Taking a Latin dance tune and performing a series of variations on the
tune, thus combining the popularity of the tune
and subjecting it to a very Gottschalkian treatment, he charmed the
audience, and the début became an instant success.
In 1842 he left the United States and sailed to Europe, realizing that
a classical training would be required to achieve
his musical goals. While such professionalism in a 13-year old would
normally be the result of the parents´ ambitions,
it is clear from Gottschalk´s letters, that he himself was the driving
force. In a letter to his mother, for example,
he wrote that "I definitely expect that in two years or perhaps less
I shall be earning a living on my own." In Europe, however,
Gottschalk had a rather bumpy start, as the Conservatoire in Paris rejected
his application. For this reason, Gottschalk had
to study privately with Karl Hallé, Camille-Marie Stamaty and Pierre
Malenden (the latter teaching composition).
In the years to follow, despite the initial rejection by the musical
establishment, he built a first career as a pianist virtuoso,
prompting Frédéric Chopin to predict that Gottschalk would soon become
one of the foremost pianists of the century.
Despite his success in Europe, Gottschalk was skeptical of European
musical life. He ridiculed the cult of the genius,
and the grotesque idiosyncracies developed by some of his European fellow
pianists. Franz Liszt, for example,
he called the "Alcibiades of the piano", characterizing him furthers
as "devoured by a thirst for glory."
Commenting on Liszt´s "long hair", he remarked that this "came to be
the symbol of the art for [Liszt´s] numerous adepts.
There was no romantic who did not wear his hair long and there are today
some who have none of Liszt´s talents except the hair!"
It is interesting to note that (young) Gottschalk seems to have been
slightly prejudiced against Northern Europe,
and Germany in particular, since during his time in Europe he never
performed there. A possible reason is that his father,
Edward Gottschalk, lived in Germany and England in his youth and studied
at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
Since relations with his father were at best businesslike, it is quite
possible that, in his early years, he tried to avoid following
in his father´s footsteps. Later in life, he reached out to German communities
in South America and also pressed his sister
Clara to try to get his compositions published with the German company
Schott & Söhne in Mainz.
In 1853, Gottschalk returned to the United States, possibly trying to
escape an environment that he regarded as being
dominated by egotism and vanity. Re-adjusting to American culture seems
to have been accompanied by some problems
(and, typically for Gottschalk, by rather caustic criticism on his side,
culminating in remarks such as "New Jersey is the
poorest place in the world to give concerts, except Central Africa..."),
and in the years to come he would travel extensively
throughout the United States and Canada to earn a living. In 1854 he
also spent an extensive period of time in Cuba,
his musical interest gradually shifting towards Central and South America.
In the 1860s, he had established himself again as a major figure in
American musical life, partly as a result of tremendous
hard work -- as is evident from his travel schedule which, at one point
in 1862, included 85 concerts (all at different locations)
in just four and a half months. What life under such pressure was like
is best summed up by the following remark in
Gottschalk´s diaries: "Arrived half past eight at the hotel, took in
a hurry a cup of bad tea, and away to business.
One herring for dinner! nine hours on the train! and, in spite of everything,
five hundred persons who have paid that you
may give them two hours of poesy, of passion, and of inspiration. I
confess to you secretly that they certainly will be cheated this evening."
In September 1865, his career took a sharp turn when Gottschalk had
to leave the United States after a scandal about his relationship
with a student at Oakland Female Seminary. Gottschalk left the country,
embarking on what would become his last
(and perhaps most successful) tour, during the course of which he travelled
to Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires,
and Rio de Janeiro (and many other less well-known locations). His concerts
were tremendously successful all across
South America and sometimes took the form of "monster concerts" involving
up to 650 performers.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk died Saturday, December 18, 1869, in Tijuca
(Brazil), three weeks after collapsing during one
his concerts, just when he had finished playing his sorrowful "Morte!!"
and was about to begin moving on to the next piece. (c) 2001 by Axel Gelfert

PART II
For a better understanding of Gottschalk's music, it is important to
have a look at his life. Both show a remarkable diversity,
resulting from influences they received from different cultures. Gottschalk
was born in 1829 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In this city you could find influences of european [especially french],
caribbean and african, spanish and south american culture.
You could hear French, Spanish and English or a mixture made up from
these languages on the streets of New Orleans.
The reason for this was that Louisiana belonged to diffent countries
[first to France then Spain and then again to France]
before it finally was declared a part of the USA.
So, where were the Gottschalk's from? Gottschalks father, Edward, was
a descendent of spanish jews, but was born in London, England.
His mother, Aimée, had french ancestors [de Brusle]. Her grandfather
was governor on Santo Domingo. During the time of
the slaves' revolt the family fled to New Orleans. Gottschalk's grandmother
and a maid were born on Santo Domingo.
So the french influence in the family was still dominating. At home
the family members spoke mostly french.
So it's no surprise that a lot of the titles of Gottschalk's works are
in french.
Louis Moreau [called Moreau] was the eldest of seven children. His musical
talent was discovered at an early age -
so he was sent to Paris to study music. He stayed in Europe for eleven
years, where he made some good and some
bad experiences. A good one surely was to find friends like Georges
Bizet and Camille Saint-Saëns. But he also met Chopin
[who was quite impressed by the young Gottschalk], Offenbach, Berlioz
and Meyerbeer. One of the worst experiences Gottschalk
made in France was the fact that Pierre Zimmermann, he was the director
of the "Paris Conservatoire" at that time, barred him from
entrance to the Conservatoire without even an audition. Zimmermann had
the opion that the Americans were barbarians and may know
how to built locomotives, but had no idea how to compose music. Well,
today it sounds funny to learn that not only women
[like Louise Farrenc] had a hard time at the "Paris Convervatoire",
but Americans, too. It must have been a special satisfaction
for Gottschalk that he was appointed as a member of the Conservatiore's
jury seven years later. Another member of that jury was
Pierre Zimmermann - the same person, who thought that Americans can't
be artists. In addition one of Gottschalk's works, "Bamboula", was selected as a part of the exams for the students.
Another positive experience Gottschalk made in Europe was his residence
at the Spanish court, under the patronage of Queen Isabella II.
His stay there lasted 18 months. During that time he composed a lot,
pieces like "El Sitio Zaragoza" [The Siege of Saragossa] -
composed for 10 (!) pianos. In 1853, Gottschalk was now 24 years old,
he returned to America. Here he travelled again trough
the whole country, giving concerts at every opportunity. Often he played
his own compositions at the piano, but he was also famous
for his interpretations of works by other composers (e.g. Beethoven's
piano sonatas). Gottschalk had a lot of success,
like Chopin had predicted, and was declared "King of Pianists" in Philadelphia.
In New York he performed together with Sigismund Thalberg,
a very famous pianist at that time. Just four years later, in 1857,
Gottschalk travelled to the West Indies with the soprano Adelina Patti
and her father (she was just 14 years old). There he stayed for three
years and again one can hear the influences of his stay in his music.
For example in his Symphony # 1 "La Nuit des Tropiques" you can
hear Afro-Cuban percussion. The whole Symphony,
completed in 1859 on the island of Guadeloupe, lasts just about 20 minutes,
but one can easily feel the flair of the tropics. "'La Nuit des tropiques' probably derived its name from [Félicien]
David's symphonic ode 'Christophe Colomb'. The second movement
of it was entitled 'Une nuit des tropiques' and Gottschalk almost
certainly heard it performed at the Opéra Comique when it was
premiered there in 1847." (Starr: L.M.Gottschalk, p.285). While in the
tropics Gottschalk continued to stage concerts and festivals.
Often these were not just normal festivals, but large-scale events.
To get an impression of these festivals,
I'd like to quote Gottschalk himself. On Feb. 17th 1860 he wrote:
"I had, as I say, the idea of giving a grand festival, and I made an
arrangement with the director of the Italian opera company,
then in posession of the Grand Tacon Theater. ... I set to work and
composed, on some Spanish verses written for me by a Havanese poet,
an opera in one act, entitled "Fete champetre cubaine" [der spanische
Titel lautet "Escenas Campestres"]. Then I composed
a "Triumphal Hymn" and a "Grand March". My orchestra consisted
of 650 performers, 87 choristers, 15 solo singers, 50 drums,
and 80 trumpets - that is to say, nearly 900 persons bellowing and blowing
to see who could scream the loudest."
In 1862 Gottschalk returned to New York. In the meantime the civil war
broke out, but for Gottschalk there was no doubt where
his sympathies were. Before returning to the U.S. he took the oath of
allegiance to the Union at the U.S. Consulate in Havana, Cuba.
There's even a composition with the title "The Union", in which he quotes
"The Star-Spangled Banner", the "Yankee Doodle" and "Hail Colombia".
When I look at Gottschalk as a human beeing, I can't overlook his deep
humanity and his sense of humor. An example for the latter
is the following story: in 1865 there were plans for a performance of
Gottschalk's arrangement of the March from Tannhäuser for14 pianos in San Francisco. Unfortunately the were just 13 pianists
available, so the manager of the concert hall came foreward
and proposed that his son could play the 14th piano. He was a brilliant
pianist, his father said. But when Gottschalk listened to
the art of this boy, he found out that he wasn't much of a pianist at
all. So what to do? Gottschalk had announced 14 pianists and
then he didn't want to offend the boy's father. Finally he had the piano-tuner
remove the interior mechanism of the boy's piano.
So the audience could see 14 pianists on stage and believe that they
also hear 14 pianists.
In this way Gottschalk was a man of practical solutions. This can also
be seen in his compositions. He had no problem in re-using
material from earlier compositions - and he was quite flexible when
it came to publishing different versions of the same work.
The "Grande Tarantelle" had versions for violin and piano, for
piano, violin and cello, for piano and string quartet, for piano
and two violins, for piano solo and for two pianos. In addition there
is a version reconstructed and orchestrared for piano and
orchestra by Hershy Kay. This one is on Vox CDX 5009.
After the year 1841 Gottschalk toured so much that he never stayed longer
than a few weeks in New Orleans.
He never married and he obviously loved to travel. He also died, at
the age of 40, while travelling through South America.
It's not clear what caused his death, maybe Gottschalk was just exhausted,
because of these excessive trips.
One story about his death says that he died from the yellow fever while
playing his composition "Morte" at the piano.
The date of his death is December 18th 1869.
There are lots of stories and rumours about Gottschalk, his concerts
and his popularity among women. A fact is that he was
a pioneer in composition, because he didn't limit his work to a single
style. Besides works like "The Union" we can find pieces
which remind at Chopin like "Berceuse", afro-caribbean works
like "El Cocoye" or "Souvenir de la Havana" with a kind
of
"brutal nostalghia" or even a piece like "Banjo" - which is like a jazz
piece from the middle of the 19th century.
Gottschalk's brother payed for the gravestone.

Margaret Bonds
Composer - Musician

NARRATIVE ESSAY
A skilled composer who helped reawaken public appreciation of spirituals,
among her many musical and creative achievements,
Chicagoan Margaret Allison Bonds (Richardson) was born on March 3, 1913.
She came from a musical family.
Her mother, Estella, was a church organist and music teacher whose home
was a gathering place for young black writers,
artists, and musicians. Among them were composers Will Marion Cook and
Florence Price. Margaret Bonds began to write
music at the age of five, a piano piece entitled "Marquette Street
Blues." Beginning at that age she studied piano with local
teachers Martha Anderson and T. Theodore Taylor. While in high school
she studied piano and composition with Price and
later with William Dawson. Bonds first received notice outside the black
community in 1932, when, at the age of nineteen,
she won the Wanamaker Foundation Prize for her song "Sea Ghost.
She became the first black American soloist to appear
with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she performed Price's Piano
Concerto in F minor at the 1933 World's Fair.
Inspired by Price's success as a composer, she became determined to
focus as much as possible on composition.
She received her B.M. (1933) and M.M. (1934) degrees from Northwestern
University, where she studied with Emily Boettscher Bogue.
Throughout the interwar years she continued to be active as a concert
musician, appearing with orchestras and giving solo recitals.
She also worked as an accompanist for Abbie Mitchell and Etta Moten,
among others. It was also at this time that she opened
the Allied Arts Academy of ballet and music for black children in Chicago.
Greater scope for her compositional activities, however,
did not come until she made a big move. About 1939 Bonds went to New
York City, where she served for a time as editor in the
Clarence Williams music publishing firm. One of the few oldtime New
Orleans jazzmen to be a success at the business side of music,
Williams already was well past his biggest hits. His company, however,
offered Bonds an entree to the New York pop music scene.
She wrote a few popular songs, including a successful one, "Peachtree
Street, with Andy Razafar in 1939. In 1940 she married
Lawrence Richardson. In 1941, with Harold "Hal Dickinson, she wrote
"Spring Will Be So Sad (When She Comes This Year).
Dickinson was founder and leader of the Modernaires vocal quartet, which
sang this song with Ray Eberle on a 1941
record by the Glen Miller Orchestra. Some will know it as the flip side
of "Perfida, which was a top ten hit. Like many other ballads
of the era, "Spring Will Be So Sad captures the feelings of loss
or longing engendered by the World War II.
It was the concert music side, however, rather than the pop, that eventually
took precedence in Bonds's career. She studied piano
with Djane Herz and composition with Robert Starer at Juilliard. She
also received a Rosenwald Fellowship and an award for
studying composition with Roy Harris. She then toured, and sometimes
performed a piano duet with Gerald Cook on radio broadcasts,
in the United States and Canada. In 1944 the duo played an entire series
on WNYC. In addition to her own works and those of other
contemporary black American composers, her repertoire included black
spirituals, the appreciation of which she promoted through
her fine arrangements. In later life Bonds taught in New York at the
American Music Wing and served as music director for
several of the city's theaters, including the Stage of Youth, the East
Side Settlement House, and the White Barn Theater.
Before moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s, she also organized a chamber
music society to foster the work of black American
musicians and composers and established a sight-singing program at Mount
Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem.
She worked with the Inner City Institute and Repertory Theater and wrote
arrangements for the Los Angeles Jubilee Singers.GREATEST CONTRIBUTION SEEN AS COMPOSER
Bonds made her greatest contribution as a composer. Her output consists
largely of vocal music. In addition to the pop songs,
her best-known works are arrangements of spirituals for solo voice or
chorus. Some of her arrangements were commissioned
and recorded by Leontyne Price in the 1960s. Bonds's arrangement of
"He's Got the Whole World in His Hands is among her
best-known. John Lovell, Jr., in his exhaustive Black Song: The Forge
and the Flame, lists Bonds, along with Cook and
Harry T. Burleigh, among twentieth-century composers whose arrangements
contributed significantly to widening public
enjoyment and appreciation of spirituals. Among Bond's other vocal works,
the most important are settings of contemporary
writers such as John Dos Passos, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes.
Several of her major works are settings of Hughes,
including her most popular song, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers(1941).
A worthy alternative to the setting by Howard Swanson,
it entered into the repertoire of Rawn Spearman and Lawrence Winter
as well as that of Etta Moten. With Hughes she wrote The Ballad of the Brown King for vocal soloists, chorus, and
orchestra (1954), which at one time was part of the annual musical
calender of many black American churches. Other Hughes-inspired works
are Three Dream Portraits for voice and piano (1959),
perhaps the finest of all these Hughes settings, To a Brown Girl
Dead (1956), the stage work for Shakespeare in Harlem (1959),
and Fields of Wonder for male chorus and piano (1964). Her theater
pieces on other texts are Julie, U.S.A., and Wings over Broadway.
She also wrote a ballet entitled The Migration (1964). Bonds's
instrumental music, both piano pieces and orchestral works,
tends to be programmatic. Among her more ambitious piano works is, appropriately,
the Spiritual Suite. Troubled Water,
based on the spiritual "Wade in the Water, exists in a 1964 version
for cello as well as the piano original often programmed
by Frances Walker. The best-received of her small handful of orchestral
works has been the Montgomery Variations,
which she wrote in 1965 during the march on Montgomery and dedicated
to Martin Luther King, Jr. Among her liturgically-inspired
pieces is the Mass in D minor for chorus and orchestra or, alternately,
for chorus and organ (1959). Her last major piece is
Credo for baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1972), which one month after
her death was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra
under Zubin Mehta. Bonds's style was not a highly original one. As an
arranger, she was influenced by Cook and Burleigh.
"I came to realize, she said, "that most composers at one time or another
reflect their friends (Unpublished reminiscence, 1967,
quoted in Abdul, 55). She was comfortable, too, with the received tenets
of musical Romanticism, acknowledging Tchaikovsky
as a model. At the same time, however, her arrangements of spirituals,
with their jazz chords and strong syncopated basses,
are among the most ragtime-influenced of all such arrangements. The
vitality of her treatments is especially pleasing in uptempo spirituals.
Among Bonds's honors are awards from ASCAP, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority,
the National Association of Negro Musicians,
the National Council of Negro Women, and the Northwestern University
Alumni Association.SOURCES:
Abdul, Raoul. Blacks in Classical Music. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977.
Contributions of Black Women to America. Vol. 1. Ed. Marianna W. Davis.
Columbia, S.C.: Kenday Press, 1982.
Green, Mildred D. "A Study of the Lives and Works of Five Black Composers
in America. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1975.
Hitchcock, H. Wiley, and Stanley Sadie, eds. The New Grove Dictionary
of American Music. Vol. 1. New York: Stockton Press, 1986.
Lovell, John, Jr. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. New York, Macmillan,
1972.
Roach, Hildred. Black American Music: Past and Present. Vol. 1. Malabar,
Fla.: R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1985.
Southern Eileen. Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African
Musicians. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.
Thomas, A. J. "A Study of the Selected Masses of Twentieth-Century Black
Composers:
Margaret Bonds, Robert Ray, George Walker, and David Baker. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Illinois, 1983.
Variety 266 (10 May 1972): 86.
Biography Resource Center
(c)2001, Gale Group, Inc.

Ulysses Simpson Kay
Composer

INTRODUCTION
Ulysses S. Kay was one of the most outstanding composers of twentieth-century
classical idioms. His works were conducted
by leading conductors and played by leading orchestras. He studied composition
with some of the major pedagogues in the
twentieth century, including Howard Hanson, Paul Hindemith, Otto Luening,
and Bernard Rogers. William Grant Still encouraged
him early on to become a composer and remained a mentor. He received
commissions for works from the Juilliard School of Music
in New York, the National Symphony, and Opera/South, among many others.
He composed over 135 pieces, including operas,
piano music, orchestral and choral works, and chamber music. He wrote
scores for television and for films. In his music,
he used many styles ranging from spiritual-like melodies through neoclassicism
to the atonal sounds of his contemporaries.
American Composers Alliance Bulletin that, his "musical language was
that of enlightened modernism." As a consultant for
Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), Kay influenced publishing decisions
and other issues. His career began to accelerate
after a performance of his orchestral overture, Of New Horizons,
by the New York Philharmonic in Lewisohn Stadium in New York
on July 9, 1944. Significant awards followed, giving him the recognition
and exposure that his music needed to insure his future success.
He received many honorary doctorates later in life for his contributions
to American
classical music, and in 1979, the American Institute of Arts voted him
into membership.NARRATIVE ESSAY
Kay was born on January 7, 1917, in Tucson, Arizona. He died on May
20, 1995, at home in Teaneck, New Jersey.
He was the son of Elizabeth Davis Kay and Ulysses S. Kay, and he had
one sister. He was the nephew of the New Orleans
jazz legend and cornet player, Joe "King" Oliver, who influenced him
in his formative years. EDUCATION AND INFLUENCES
Kay's father was a barber who loved to sing. His mother, Elizabeth,
played the piano. His father used to sing ballads,
hymns, work songs, and songs he created to his son to keep him entertained.
His sister played the music of the nineteenth-century
Polish composer, Frederic Chopin, on the piano in their home. His uncle,
Joe Oliver, determined that young Ulysses should
study the piano before Oliver would teach him to play the trumpet, so
he studied piano with William A. Ferguson. At school,
he learned to play the violin. His sister helped him discover the saxophone
while he was a student at Dunbar Junior High School.
He loved jazz and the sounds of the saxophone, so he temporarily gave
up the piano and the violin to study that instrument.
At Tucson Senior High School, he played in the marching band, sang in
the glee club, and played saxophone in jazz orchestras
whenever he could. In 1934 he graduated from high school and enrolled
at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He received his
bachelor of music degree with training in public school music in 1938.
Kay encountered the music of Hungarian composer and pianist Bela Bartok
as part of his piano study with Julia Rebeil, and he was
schooled in music theory under John L. Lowell at the university. He
later said that those experiences gave him a completely new
perspective on the field of music composition. He received a scholarship
to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York,
and he enrolled there as a graduate student in 1938. He earned a master's
degree in 1940, studying composition with Bernard Rogers
and then with Howard Hanson until 1941. In Rochester, Kay first heard
his works performed, including Sinfonietta in 1939,
Oboe Concerto in 1940, and Dance Calinda in 1941. In the summer of 1941,
Kay had the opportunity to study composition with
Paul Hindemith at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts.
He continued his studies
with Hindemith at Yale University from 1941 to 1942.THE WAR AND THE MIDDLE YEARS
In 1942 Kay enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserves in World War II and
served three and a half years as a musician second
class in Quonset Point, Rhode Island. He played the flute, saxophone,
and piccolo in the Navy band. He played the piano
in dance orchestras. In addition, he was able to continue arranging
and composing. A significant work of Kay's from this period
was the orchestral overture, Of New Horizons in 1944, written
in the neoclassical style, which brought him to the attention of the
critics.
Kay's Suite for Orchestra in 1945 received a prize from BMI,
the first of many to come. The following year, A Short Overture,
also for orchestra, earned the George Gershwin Memorial Award. It was
first performed in Brooklyn, New York, on March 31, 1947,
conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Kay composed Suite, for strings,
in 1947.
Kay received the first of many awards designed to give him more time
to compose in 1946. The Alice M. Ditson Fellowship supported
him during one year of creative work. BMI elected him to full membership
in 1947. In 1947--48, he received the Julius Rosenwald
Fellowship and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters,
and he traveled to Europe. One of his orchestral compositions
from 1948, Portrait Suite, based on sculptures by Henry Moore,
Jacob Lipschitz, and Wilhelm Lehmbruch,
received the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra Award.
From 1946 through 1949, he attended Columbia University as a composition
student of Otto Leuning. He completed a movie score
for the motion picture, The Quiet One, in 1948, and subsequently
arranged a concert suite from that score.
The suite was premiered in New York in 1948.
On August 20, 1949, he married Barbara Harrison. Their three children
are Melinda Lillian, Virginia, and Hillary. From 1949 until 1952,
he lived in Italy with two Prix de Rome awards covering the years 1949--1952
and a Fulbright grant for 1950--51.
His Concerto for Orchestra was completed in 1948. In 1950, while
he was still in Italy, he wrote Symphony in E, his first major
symphonic work.
A consulting position with BMI lasted from 1953 until 1968. The major
completed composition of 1952 was Three Pieces After Blake,
for soprano and orchestra. In 1953 the Concerto for Orchestra (1948),
which was written in Italy, premiered in Venice by the
Teatro La Fenice Orchestra conducted by Jonel Perlea. Six Dances
for string orchestra and Serenade for full orchestra followed in
1954.
The next year he composed his first one-act opera, The Boor.
He wrote a second one-act opera, Juggler of Our Lady, in 1956.
In 1958 Kay went to the Soviet Union on a cultural exchange program
with the first delegation of American composers.
Included in this distinguished group were Roy Harris, Peter Mennin,
and Roger Sessions. A concert of music by these composers
was played by the Moscow State Radio Orchestra. He ended the decade
of the 1950s with a large piece for soprano, baritone, chorus,
and orchestra, called Phoebus, Arise. Kay's first major work
of the 1960s was Choral Triptych, for chorus and string orchestra
in 1962.
In 1963 he was commissioned to write "tranquil music" for a project
Edward B. Benjamin sponsored, and the result was Umbrian Scene.
The Louisville Orchestra later recorded this work. In the same year
he wrote two more major works, Fantasy Variations, for orchestra,
and Inscriptions from Whitman, for chorus and orchestra. Lincoln
College in Lincoln, Illinois, presented him with the first of many
honorary doctorates in music in 1963. Kay received a Guggenheim Fellowship
in 1964--65, and he composed Emily Dickinson Setfor women's chorus and piano. In the same year, his original
score was heard on the television special, An Essay on Death,
a tribute to John F. Kennedy. It was telecast over WNET in New York
on November 19. He wrote the film scores for two television
documentaries for The Twentieth Century series on CBS, "F.D.R.: Third
Term to Pearl Harbor," and "Submarine!," and another
documentary called New York: City of Magic. In 1965 Kay was a
visiting professor at Boston University. Bucknell University in Lewisburg,
Pennsylvania, awarded him his second honorary doctorate in music in
1966. In 1966--67 he was a visiting professor at the
University of California at Los Angeles. He wrote Markings in
1966, an essay for orchestra that took its title from Dag Hammarskjold's
book,
published posthumously. Markings was dedicated to the former
United Nations Secretary General, who had been killed in a plane crash.
It has been recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra.THE GOLDEN YEARS OF COMMISSIONS
Kay received a permanent appointment to the faculty of the Herbert H.
Lehman College of the City University of New York in 1968.
That year, the Atlanta Symphony under the direction of Robert Shaw commissioned
him to write a piece for them. Theater Set premiered
in Atlanta on September 26, 1968, on the opening night of the concert
season. Kay said that the piece was a tribute to show music,
without quoting any themes directly. Kay's alma mater, the University
of Arizona at Tucson, conferred on him an honorary doctorate
in music in 1969. That year he received an honorary doctorate of humane
letters from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois.
In 1970 he composed a sextet for woodwinds and piano called Facets,
which makes effective use of silence in the midst of sound.
It was first performed at the Eastman School of Music on October 19,
1971. In 1972 he was named Distinguished Professor of Music
at Lehman College, where he had been teaching since 1968. Commissions
for new works continued to pour in.
The Juilliard School of Music commissioned a work in 1973 for five brass
soloists and orchestra. The result was Quintet Concerto.
For the American bicentennial, he wrote four major works, each on a
different commission. The National Symphony received Western Paradise,
for narrator and orchestra (1975). The Southern Regional Metropolitan
Orchestra Managers Association, with a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts, got Southern Harmony. Southern
Harmony was premiered by the North Carolina Orchestra on February
10, 1976.
The music was inspired by American hymn tunes of the mid-nineteenth
century. The Princeton Theological Seminary and Presbyterian Church
commissioned Epigrams and Hymn, also in 1976. Opera/South in
Jackson, Mississippi, commissioned Kay's first full-length opera, Jubilee,
based on Margaret Walker's book of the same title. The premiere of that
work was on November 20, 1976, in Jackson.
Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, gave him his fourth honorary
doctorate in music in 1978. The Saratoga Performing Arts Center
commissioned Chariots for orchestra in 1978, and that work received
its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra with the composer
conducting on August 8, 1979. The University of Missouri at Kansas City
awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1981.
In August of 1982, he was a resident fellow at the Bellagio Study and
Conference Center in Como, Italy. He retired from his position
at Lehman College in 1988. Kay's last major work was an opera titled
Frederick Douglass, which he completed in 1991.
The Washington Post cited his interview at the premiere of the work
at Newark Symphony Hall with the New Jersey State Opera
in April of 1991, when Kay said, "I wasn't composing operas to prove
anything. I write out of interest, rather than trying to take on
the cause of blackness or whatever." Kay's numerous works can be divided
into four broad categories by genre: dramatic works,
orchestral works, vocal works, and chamber works. He withdrew some of
his earlier pieces after he had achieved maturity.
Most of his works are unpublished. Some of the published works are currently
out-of-print.
Throughout his lifetime, Kay's musical styles defied categorization.
They were not especially ethnic, nor did he strive to use folk music,
jazz, or blues, as the basis for his work. In an interview in The Black
Composer Speaks, he said in answer to a question about what
features of his own music he saw as uniquely black, "I have nothing
especially other than its expressive content." He often wrote
in a neoclassical style with modern harmonies, like Prokofiev, Shostakovich,
and Kabalevsky who worked in the Soviet Union,
but he could just as easily write in an atonal idiom. He knew the system
developed by Arnold Schoenberg for 12-tone music and
could use those techniques if he felt they helped him accomplish his
aesthetic goals.
Kay's mature style, according to Eileen Southern in the New Grove Dictionary
of American Music, "is characterized by taut but
warm melodies, complex polyphony, vibrant harmonic and orchestral coloring,
and rhythmic diversity."
Photographs of Ulysses Kay show that he was a slight man, small in frame,
and either bald or with short hair for most of his
professional life. He wore glasses. He was often photographed with a
conductor's baton in his hand. In the Washington Post scholar
and musician Hildreth Roach described Kay as "a gentleman and a gentle
man, highly intellectual, polite, and a bit shy.
He was surprised and delighted that people would perform and listen
to his music."
Kay benefited from the multitude of achievements in the field of classical
music of William Grant Still. With more formal education
and more earned degrees in music than his mentor and friend, Kay was
able to open doors in the academic world that his
predecessor could not. When Still died in 1978, the title of "Dean of
Afro-American Composers" was passed to Kay.
Kay became the bridge between the self-taught African American composer
of European styles and an academic community
in the United States trying desperately to create a style all its own.
He was as much a part of the mainstream as any composer
active in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and yet his music
remained unique and not easily classified.SOURCES:
Baker, David, Lida M. Belt, and Herman C. Hudson, eds. The Black Composer
Speaks. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978.
Ewen, David. American Composers: A Biographical Dictionary. New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1982.
Hitchcock, H. Wiley, and Stanley Sadie, eds. The New Grove Dictionary
of American Music. London: Macmillan, 1986.
"Obituaries." Who's Who Among African Americans, 1996/1997. 9th ed.
Detroit: Gale Research, 1996.
Slonimsky, Nicolas. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 7th
ed., rev. New York: Schirmer Books, 1984.
--. "Ulysses Kay." American Composers Alliance Bulletin 7 (Fall 1957):
3.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans. Rev. ed. New York: Norton,
1983.
"Ulysses Kay: A Musical Odyssey." Washington Post, May 28, 1995.
Wyatt, Lucius R. R. "Ulysses Kay's Fantasy Variations: An Analysis."
Black Perspectives in Music 7 (Spring 1977): 75--89.
Biography Resource Center
(c)2001, Gale Group, Inc.

William Warfield
Baritone

William Warfield, an advanced voice teacher in Chicago, following
a long career as an operatic baritone, is one of the worlds leading
experts on Negro Spirituals and German Lieder. Past President of the
National Association of Negro Musicians (1985-1990)
Dr. Warfield was born in the town of West Helena, Arkansas, to a family
of sharecroppers. By the time he was 30 years old,
he had won rave reviews in a sensational debut at New York's Town Hall.
In the course of a career that has spanned more than
half a century, his incomparable voice and charismatic personality have
electrified the stages of six continents and earned
him the title of "America's Musical Ambassador." It is a career that
has witnessed both social ferment and show-business revolution.
In his uncommonly personal memoir, {My Music & My Life,} Warfield has
written a unique history of twentieth-century America.
The panorama of his life and art embraces the Cold War and the Civil
Rights movement, the big-studio era of Hollywood and the
innovation of television drama, his marriage to Leontyne Price and his
stage and screen roles in Porgy and Bess and Show Boat.
He is a consumate oratorio singer. He has appeared with great orchestras
and great conductors, all of whom have applauded
his musicianship. Television and film have recorded his triumphs as
singer and actor. Critical opinion regards him as one of the great
singer-actors of the 20th century, Dr. Warfield joined the Board of
the Schiller Institute in 1996 and has been engaged in the
efforts of the Schiller Institute to revive a movement for a National
Conservatory of Music, first pioneered at the beginning of
the century by Antonin Dvorak. He has also worked extensively in voice-training
master classes with the Schiller Institute.
His skill in developing the student's ability to convey the meaning
of a passage--be it drama, poetry or music--and its consequent
correct phrasing, as being the key to achieving the "technical" solutions
required for beautiful
singing and recitation, can only be described as electrifying.
Born in 1920 to a family of sharecroppers in West Helena, Arkansas,
William Warfield first developed his extraordinary vocal
skills by singing in the choir of his father's Baptist church. During
William's childhood, the Warfield family moved to Rochester,
New York, where he took formal voice lessons. In 1938, during his high
school senior year, William won the District Award
for the National Music Educators' League vocal competition, which included
a scholarship to the music school of his choice.
The following fall, William began study at the Eastman School of Music,
where he received his bachelor's degree in Music Studies in 1942.
After a period of service in the U.S. Army during World War II, William
Warfield returned to New York and successfully auditioned for
a part in the Broadway show Call Me Mister. Following his performance
in this musical, he received roles in two other productions,
1948's Set My People Free and 1950's Regina, two parables
concerning American race relations. Also in 1950, Warfield played a
role
in the film adaptation of Showboat and made his New York Town
Hall debut. This debut met with great public excitement and
critical acclaim, thus launching his successful career. In 1952 William
Warfield was chosen to star as Porgy in Gershwin's revival
of the legendary musical Porgy and Bess, opposite famous soprano
Leontyne Price. The two stars performed the title roles
throughout the United States and Europe. After returning to New York,
Warfield and Price married. Together they performed
several remarkable concerts, including a joint recital with the Philadelphia
Orchestra in 1956.
Throughout the remainder of the decade, William Warfield toured with
the U.S. State Department throughout Africa, Europe, Asia
and the Near East. In the 1960's he performed in a series of European
performances, including venues in Greece, Switzerland, and Austria.
On March 24, 1975, the twenty-fifth anniversary of William Warfield's
Town Hall debut was commemorated by a recital at the Duke Ellington
Center in New York's Carnegie Hall. This gala event was attended by
thousands of his fans and admirers, including his mentor,
Marian Anderson. William Warfield passed away on August 25, 2002.

The role of the Black artist in the history of music
is increasingly being given serious
attention. Recent discoveries of excellent Black symphonic music, both
contemporary and two centuries old,
have begun to eradicate the stereotype of Black music as a program of
spirituals, jazz, and the blues.
Even more important, students of comprehensive musicology (the study of
music in relation to the culture
and society in which it exist) are beginning to focus on the unique, non-European
nature of Black music.

Black music looks back to Africa, not Europe, as the Old World. Whereas
the European tradition often
considers music in the realm of "art for arts sake," African music is
first and foremost a social function.
It is such an important part of daily life that ritual and social events
can not happen without proper music.
As a result, despite the lack of formal theory, both African music and
the traditional African audience have
always been among the world's most sophisticated.

An excerpt from "The Negro almanac - a reference work on the African
American", 1976

"Die Zauberflöte"

Ray M. Wade Jr.Lyric Tenor

Lyric
tenor Ray M. Wade, Jr. was a member of the Solo Ensemble of the Nationaltheater
Mannheim, Germany from the 95 through the 98 seasons where he sang several
roles including; Alfredo Germont in La Traviata, Conte Almaviva
in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Ferrando in Così
fan tutte, Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Belmonte
in Die Entführung aus dem Serial, The Italian Singer
in Der Rosenkavalier, Arturo in Lucia di Lammermoor,
Chevalier Belfiore in Die Reise nach Reims andCamille
de Rossillon in Die Lustige Witwe. He is a native of Ft.
Worth, Texas where he began his career with the Ft. Worth Opera Theater
Chorus.

"Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung"
Mr. Wade had the privilege of singing on a concert for the celebration
of the 20th anniversary of the coronation of Pope John Paul II
in November of 1998 in Vatican City, Italy in which the Pope attended.
Mr. Wade then made his debut with the Deutsche Oper Berlin where
he sang the tenor role in Beethoven's 9th Symphony in December
of the same year under the direction of Christian Thielemann. Mr.
Wade also sang in the Bregenzer Festspiel's production of A
Greek Passion by Martinu in the summer of 1999."La Cenerentola"
Mr. Wade was a Laureate (winner) in the 1996 Queen Elizabeth International
Music Competition for Singing in Brussels, Belgium, the first place winner
of the 1994 Stewart Awards National Operatic Voice Competition in Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma, a national winner of the1993 Metropolitan Opera National
Council Auditions for Young Singers and also a winner of the 7th Enrico
Caruso International Singing Competition in Milan, Italy in October of
1992. He was only the second American ever to win this prestigious competition.
He was in San Francisco Opera's Merola Opera Program in the summer of
1994 and performed the role of Don Ottavio in Western Opera Theater's
1994 tour of Mozart's Don Giovanni."La Cenerentola"
Mr. Wade has performed with several world class orchestras including The
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, The San Francisco Opera Orchestra, The Deutsche
Oper Berlin Orchestra, The Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra,The Monnaie
Symphony Orchestra in Brussels, Belgium, The Orchestre Royal de
Chambre de Mons, Belgium, De Vlaams Opera Orchestra, Belgium,
The Nationaltheater Mannheim Symphony Orchestra in Mannheim, Das
Rundfunk Orchester des Südwestfunk in Kaiserslauten, Germany,
The Orchestra del Teatro dell' Opera di Roma,The St. Paul Chamber
Orchestra in St. Paul, Minnesota. U.S.A. under the direction of Bobby
McFerrin, TheVienna Symphony Orchestra, and in October
of 1999 Mr. Wade sang the role of Belmonte in a concert version of Mozart's
Die Entführung aus dem Serail in Munich's famed Prinz
Regententheater in which Dietrich Fischer-Diskau played the role
of Bassa Selim with The Münchener Kammerorchester. Mr. Wade
sang the title role in Gounod's Faust with The Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra of Flanders in Antwerp, Belgium in June of
2000. He sang the tenor role in Rossini's Stabat Mater in Leipzig,
Germany with The MDR Orchestra in the famed Gewandhaus under the
direction of Marcello Viotti in March of 2001. He currently sings
the role of Tamino in Mozart's Zauberflöte in Basel,
Switzerland for 30 performances throughout the 2001 / 2002 season.
Mr. Wade studied voice with Willis Patterson, who was Associate Dean Academic
Affairs and professor of voice at the University
of Michigan School of Music

Marie Hadley Robinson, a native of Thomasville, Georgia, made her
operatic debut as Aida with the Graz Opera, where she was principal
soloist for three years.
Aida, "Aida", Nationaltheater Mannheim
During her tenure at Graz, she was hailed,
by critics as, "the finest Tosca of her generation". Also at Graz,
she became the first Black soprano to portray the role of
Sieglinde in Die Walküre in a state performance anywhere in the
world. Subsequent engagements took her to Vienna, Munich, Berlin,
Frankfurt, Prague, Kassel, Zurich, and a tour of Japan with the
Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin. She also was principal soloist for five
years with the National Theatre Mannheim.
Cordelia, "Lear", Nationaltheater Mannheim
Her repertoire includes
thirty-three major roles and she has appeared with forty-two companies
in Eastern and Western Europe as well as South America. In the
United States, she has performed with the Michigan Opera Theater,
Los Angeles Opera Theater, the Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo,
Omaha Operas and Opera Ebony.
Elisabetta, "Don Carlo", Nationaltheater Mannheim
Ms Robinson has appeared in recitals
at Shenandoah University, Florida A. and M. University, the University
of Iowa and the Kennedy Center in Washington D. C, where she was
the soprano soloist in Verdi's Requiem and Poulenc's Gloria with
the Paul Hill Chorale and the Washington Oratorio Society.
Giulietta, "Tales of Hoffman", Nationaltheater Mannheim
With Opera Ebony, she sang in the concert version of Fosca by Brazilian
composer Carlos Gomes in New York and with the Saskatchewan Symphony
in Saskatoon, Canada a concert version of Porgy and Bess. Her latest
concert of Porgy and Bess was with William Warfield at Longwood
Gardens, P. A. with the Kennett Symphony.
Tosca, Nationaltheater Mannheim
Most recently, Ms Robinson performed the role of Aida with
the Opera International in Mexico, Hong Kong,
Marseille and Lyon and with Opera Delaware. A Delaware University,
she has co-directed The Medium, Gianni Schiccihi, The Stoned Gues,
Trial by Jury and The Secret Marriage.
Tosca with George Forture, Deutsche Oper Berlin
During the fall of 2002, she produced the Marriage of Figaro
with Leland Kimball as director and
Patrick Evans musical director.
Tosca, Deutsche Oper Berlin
Marie Hadley Robinson earned
her Doctor of Music Degree from Florida State University where she
studied with Elena Nikolaide and Yvonne Ciannella. She earned a
Bachelors of Science Degree in Music Education at Florida A. and
M. University. There she studied with Dr. Rebecca Steele.
Amelia, "Un Ballo in Maschera", Stadttheater Giessen
Her awards include prizes in the VI Internacional de Canto,
the Palm Beach Civic Opera Auditions,
and the Diuguid Fellowship Award. Her recent
awards include membership into Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society and Delta
Alpha German Honor Society.
Electra, "Idomeneo", Nationaltheater Mannheim
Dr. Robinson has served on the boards
of Opera Delaware, Delaware Classical Showcase, the Newark Symphony
Orchestra of Delaware. She is now on the boards of The Delaware
Valley Chorale, and The National Opera Association. Dr. Robinson is a
Delaware State Governor of NATS and an Associate Professor
of Voice and Opera at the University of Delaware.

Lorna Marie Hartling

Lorna Marie Hartling (maiden name, Wilson) was born in Cleveland, Ohio
1965, to Mrs. Delores M.- and Mr. B. LeMarr Wilson.
Both parents sang, however, Mrs. Delores Wilson, after having received
her Master's Degree in Singing Performance at the
Cleveland Institute of Music, performed on a regular basis with The
Cleveland Opera Co.
Becoming impatient with High School, Lorna Wilson completed all of the
requirements necessary for graduation from
Shaker Hts. High School in Jan. of 1983, which permitted her to begin
studies as a fulltime student at
The Cleveland Institute of Music that same month, even though graduation
wasn't until June of 83'.
Studying with the (former) Assistant Principal Violist and then moving
on to study with the Principal Violist of the
Cleveland Orchestra, Robert Vernon, Miss Wilson received the guidance
and training needed to build a solid technical foundation.
Accomplishments included, Scholarships accompanied by solo performances
from, 'The Fort Knightly Club' and
'The Musical Arts Society'. She was invited in 1984 to perform as one
of three violists in America with the
'All American College Orchestra' of Disney World. However, inspite of
the Scholarships, and awarded orchestra positions,
there was a strong urge to explore her artistic possibilities in a different
Country. In1987, after receiving her Bachelor's Diploma
in Viola Performance, she was one of 15 Americans chosen to perform
with the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Fargau, Germany,
directed by Leonard Bernstein. The experience with Mr. Bernstein left
a lasting impression, and after 2 further years of study at
'The Cleveland Institute of Music' in the 'Àrtists Diploma' program,
Miss Wilson returned to the Schleswig- Holstein Musik Festival
in 1989 with intentions to remain in Germany. In1990 she auditioned
for and was awarded a position in,
'The Herbert-von-Karajan Akademie'. This included regular performances
with the 'Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester',
chamber music performances, also coached by a member of the 'BPhO ',
and private lessons with a member of the 'BPhO'.
Upon finishing this two year Akademie program, in 1992 Miss Wilson auditioned
for and was awarded a position with the
'Radio Symphony Orchester' of Berlin, ( now entitled,'Das Deutsche Symphony
Orchester' Berlin; or
'The German Symphony Orchestra' of Berlin.). Shortly after winning and
securing her position in the Orchestra,
she married and she and her husband have 2 children.

A
CLASSIC IN BLACK

AFRICAN
INFLUENCES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN MUSIC
AS ILLUSTRATED IN EARLY DELTA BLUES PERFORMANCES

By
Ralph Eastman

American
popular music has become the most influential in the world. This lesson
surveys African musical influences and how they served in major part
to create this uniquely American musical form. With the proliferation
of recordings and media, these influences have become thoroughly absorbed
into all categories of mainstream popular music. However, an examination
of early blues music produced in the Mississippi Delta area of the American
south provides an especially good example of how these forces originally
began their synthesis with European musical traditions.

Slave
traders brought millions of African men, women and children to America
virtually since the continent's first settlement. Because of its relative
proximity to the America, many Africans bound into slavery came from
the regions of West Africa . Slave holders actively sought to destroy
prior tribal allegiances as well as other vestiges of things African
in order to reduce cohesion among slaves that might lead to rebellion.
Slaves could bring few actual objects of the lost African life with
them in the difficult western passage of the slave ships. They did,
however, carry with them many memories or retentions of African culture,
tradition and religion. To assure spiritual as well as physical survival,
African slaves learned to adapt their knowledge to the conditions of
the New World.

Letters
and diaries exist in which eighteenth and nineteenth century American
and European travelers in the American south recorded their impressions
of the "wild and primitive" music of black slaves. Some writers mentioned
the strong emotive power of the dissonant singing. All, however, dismissed
the music as a curious and bizarrely spontaneous expression of a primitive
people. Naturally, music that retained so many African sensibilities
sounded strange to these reporters accustomed to European standards
for music. In part, African-American music did not seem "pretty" or
"proper" to Europeans because its form and structure aspired to a completely
different set of standards. Therefore, listeners who evaluated it in
European terms and found it lacking were doing the equivalent of comparing
apples and oranges.

Charlie Patton

African
Retentions

For
this discussion, the primary difference between European and African
conventions in music is that European music is polyphonic (composed
of the juxtaposition of many complimentary and contradictory tones)
while African music is polyrhythmic (composed of the juxtaposition of
many complimentary and contradictory rhythms). This is not to say that
rhythm was excluded from the former or tone and melody from the latter.
Rather, each culture focused and organized its approach to making music
around a different central property. It is important to remember that
the African retentions surveyed here tend to be more concerned with
rhythm than with tone.

As
the focus of African music is rhythmic rather than tonal, it ought come
as no surprise that, when considering tone, traditional African musicians
were more interested in the variety of possible shadings around it than
in replicating the pure tone itself. This caused notes to sound "fuzzy"
or imprecise to Western trained ears. Further, the modal scales that
Africans employed did not fit precisely into the standard European diatonic
scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do). In order to accommodate to
the tuning of European instruments, black American musicians created
the so-called "blue notes" (the flatted fifth and seventh notes of the
eight note diatonic scale). With stringed instruments, American players
purposely ran knife blades or annealed bottle neck "slides" along the
metal strings of the fretboard to distort or extend the "pure" tones
that instruments were designed to produce. Often instead of, or in addition
to, regular strumming, bluesmen slapped and pulled at guitar, fiddle
or bass strings to increase this "dissonant" effect.

Many
Western African languages differ from European ones in that they are
tonally based. This means that a word is given its final meaning both
by its sound and the pitch at which it is spoken. Louisiana slave owners
banned slaves from possessing drums out of fear that slave would use
them for unauthorized communication with one another. The slave owners
assumed that slaves would send messages in a primitive form of Morse
code. The truth was far more interesting and more formidable: By striking
different areas of the drum, drummers could recreate the actual pitches
of the words of Western African languages! English speaking American
bluesmen frequently used the "voice" of their guitars to complete sung
or spoken vocal lines in songs.

McKinley Morganfield
Muddy Waters

Given
that many of the slaves' native languages were tonal, there was a much
closer link between the concepts of "speaking" and "singing." In such
African societies, music and song were not experienced as being separate
from life and work and, therefore, work and communal activities were
organized by musical rhythms. American slaves and chain gang workers
used "work songs" for coordinating proper and safe sequencing in group
labor. The stressed beats or words of the chant signaled specific parts
of the labor. The leader would (call) sing one line and the rest of
the group would sing the answering line (response) in unison as they
performed the particular task, such as rowing, laying railroad track
or chopping trees. In this context, slaves sang less as an expression
of misery at their indenture than as a means of orchestrating their
forced labors. In this way, African work songs and European sea shanties
are analogous: They both used song rhythms as a precise means for coordinating
labor. This "call and response" pattern is now common in popular music,
i.e., a lead vocalist sings a line which the rest of backing singers
answer in chorus.

Slaves
and, later, sharecroppers used also modal "field hollers" ("arhoolies")
as a means of controlling their draft animals or communicating with
other workers in adjoining fields. These a cappella cries are likewise
descended from African musical traditions and retained their functional
purpose. Many later blues musicians appropriated this type of "wild"
vocalizing as their preferred singing style.

The
South has a long tradition of slave and free black musicians entertaining
audiences of both races. As most slave musicians were untrained in European
musical conventions, much of the training was either "by ear" or by
one folk musician to another. Musicians either had to build their own
instruments or, more commonly, adapt existing European instruments for
their purposes. Essentially, these folk musicians approached the playing
of European instruments with an African consciousness, thereby synthesizing
a new form of music.

Chester Burnette
Howlin' Wolf

In
the post-Civil War rural south, African-American men had very few job
options: They could be laborers, field hands, share-croppers or musicians.
Understandably, the successive callings of minstrel, songster and bluesman
quickly became established professions. While the itinerant musician's
life was less back breaking than that of a laborer's, a professional
bluesman needed to have both substantial instrumental and performing
skills as well as a vast reserve of songs and the improvisational skills
necessary to create new ones instantly. He further needed the physical
stamina to play and sing all night long. This is because the blues was
a celebratory music, played to accompany dancers reveling at rowdy all-night
country dances. These "frolics" retained elements of African tribal
dance and, unlike the carefully circumscribed social dance practices
of Europe, individual dances could become extended affairs, often an
hour or more long. The bluesman served as a "living jukebox" and each
song/performance had to last as long as participants wanted to dance.
Obviously, at this stage of the folk process, neither individual "songs"
nor the musical form of the blues itself could exist in a final, fixed
state. One of the defining talents for a professional rural bluesman
in the first decades of this century was the ability indefinitely to
sustain a single performance by improvising new verses and instrumental
figures. This required that blues performers' conceptions of both "song"
and musical form be sufficiently elastic to allow for the accomodation
of such improvisition to expand their musical ideas in performance.
Because of this practical necessity and the fact that notions of copyright
were absent from this vernacular music, many songs in the repertoire
of recorded blues reveal performers' familiarity with, and heavy reliance
on, one another for both lyrical and instrumental inspiration.

The
blues solidified into a recognizable form (12 measures or "bars" and
AAB rhyming structure) sometime around the turn of the twentieth century.
Because the music was a vernacular form occurring before the advent
of sound recording, it is impossible to state the precise year of its
birth. However, by the late 1920's, companies began to discover a small
but lucrative market among southern African-Americans for recordings
of rural blues performances. The short playing time of a 78 rpm record
side artificially compressed these extended performances into what record
listeners, many more familiar with European Art or popular song models
than with African-derived music, mistook for the three minute long "song"
form. Increasingly, listeners viewed these forced abridgements as the
final, fixed versions of a particular "song," something their creators
never intended. With commercialization, the "art" of blues performance
suddenly became separated from, and elevated above, its actual function
in its indigenous culture. This new duality ultimately caused blues
music to undergo many changes as, over the course of this century, it
left its purely folk realm and ventured into more mainstream arenas.

Robert Johnson

The
blues was never the province of solitary old men on back porches. In
their way, critics who thought this have misunderstood the purpose and
function of the music in much the same way as did the ante-bellum observers.
While the blues may feature harsh and "mournful" sounding performances
of downbeat lyrics, its totality is nonetheless a raucous, crude, ironic
and rhythmic dance music. Listeners who insist that the blues are sad
neglect the fact that the generic melancholy of typical blues lyrics
is almost always juxtaposed with a sprightly, up-tempo instrumental
accompaniment and performance style that belies the lyrical contents.
The blues is the catalyst that brings temporary relief from a life of
drudgery, not a catalog of those drudgeries.

The
most famous Delta bluesmen who left recordings of their performances
were Charlie Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson. Charlie Patton was
the inspiration for his generation of Mississippi bluesmen. Patton's
harsh and powerful voice allowed him to project over the chaos of weekend
dances. With his guitar and vocal prowess supported by uninhibited performance
antics that pre-dated Jimi Hendrix by thirty five years, Patton was
the undisputed star of the area around Cleveland, Ms. On record, Patton's
clearest African retentions are his inventively rhythmic use of his
guitar, use of syncopation and of scales with fewer principal notes
than in the standard diatonic.

Though
a far less proficient guitarist than Patton, Eddie "Son" House is noted
for the African retentions of his savagely percussive instrumental attack,
slashing bottleneck fretting style and dramatic singing. Patton recommended
House to the Paramount Recording Company for whom he made only eight
powerful and haunting record sides. House was a sometime preacher who
constantly struggled with the moral perils of his bluesman's tumultuously
secular life instead of that of the sanctified true believer. Nonetheless,
experts consider him to be the Delta's greatest blues singer. Recorded
after his rediscovery in the 1960's, " Death Letter Blues " suggests
the ferocity of House's early work.

Robert
Johnson was a student of Patton and House whose fame outshone that of
both his masters. His precocious mastery as a singer, songwriter and
guitarist coupled with his mysterious and premature death made Johnson
a legendary figure far beyond the Delta. Keith Richards, songwriter
and guitarist for The Rolling Stones, once likened the complexity of
the rhythms in, and the execution of, Johnson's recorded performances
to that of composer J. S. Bach. Years after the bluesman's death, when
musicians like Richards and Eric Clapton found that his rhythms naturally
adapted themselves to rock and roll, they bought Johnson's music to
new generations of fans. " Crossroads Blues " is easily Robert Johnson's
best known song.

Eddie "Son" House

When
the great out-migration of African-Americans from the Delta to Chicago
and the cities northward along the Illinois Central Railroad line began
during the Depression, musicians traveled along with their audiences.
They soon discovered that, although the newly urbanized African-American
audiences still loved their music, acoustic instrumentation was not
sufficiently loud either to overcome or reflect the din of modern city
life. Fans quickly came to regard solo acoustic performances as old
fashioned. Enterprising musicians switched to electric guitars, added
drums and further amplified their sound. Among others, musicians like
Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) and Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnette)
created and personified the new "Chicago Blues" style. Both men were
raised in or near the Mississippi Delta and grew up hearing performances
and recordings of Patton, House and Johnson. In maturity, both "electrified"
their beloved Delta blues to bring them to new generations and races
of people.

As
a result of this folk process, the music was no longer African nor European:
It was a vital new hybrid -- a truly American music forged in the rural
South. In the intervening years, mass acceptance of all the African
retentions described here -- polyrhythmic music, harsh emotional vocalizing,
note bending and slurring, "call and response" vocal patterning -- has
caused them to be absorbed into the basic language of mainstream popular
music throughout the world.

Additional
information: Blues Highway, King Biscuit Time, The Blues Page

Sammy Davis Jr.
A Classic in Black

Yes, He Did

Recognized throughout much of his career as "the world's greatest
living entertainer," Sammy Davis Jr. was a
remarkably popular and versatile performer equally adept at acting,
singing, dancing, and impersonations -- in short,
a variety artist in the classic tradition. A member of the famed Rat
Pack, he was among the very first African-American
talents to find favor with audiences on both sides of the color barrier,
and he remains a perennial icon of cool.
Born in Harlem on December 8, 1925, Davis made his stage debut at the
age of three, performing with Holiday
in Dixieland, a black vaudeville troupe featuring his father and helmed
by his de facto uncle, Will Mastin.
Dubbed "Silent Sam, the Dancing Midget," he proved phenomenally popular
with audiences and the act was
soon renamed Will Mastin's Gang Featuring Little Sammy. At the age of
seven, Davis made his film debut in
the legendary musical short Rufus Jones for President, and later received
tap dancing lessons courtesy of
the great Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. In 1941, the Mastin Gang opened
for Tommy Dorsey
at Detroit's Michigan Theater. There Davis first met Dorsey vocalist
Frank Sinatra,
what was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
In 1943, Davis joined the U.S. Army, where he endured a constant battle
with racism. Upon his return from duty,
the group was renamed the Will Mastin Trio. Three years later, they
opened for Mickey Rooney, who encouraged
Davis to begin including his many impersonations in the trio's act.
Where previously they had exclusively
performed music, the addition of comedy brought new life to the group,
and by the beginning of the next decade,
they were headlining venues including New York's Capitol Club and Ciro's
in Hollywood. In 1952,
at the invitation of Sinatra, they also played the newly integrated
Copacabana. In 1954, Davis signed to Decca,
topping the charts with his debut LP, Starring Sammy Davis Jr. That
same year he lost his left eye in a
much-publicized auto accident, but upon returning to the stage in early
1955, Davis was greeted with even greater
enthusiasm than before on the strength of a series of hit singles including
"Something's Gotta Give,"
"Love Me or Leave Me," and "That Old Black Magic." A year later, Sammy
Davis Jr. made his Broadway debut in
the musical Mr. Wonderful, starring in the show for over 400 performances
and launching a hit with the song "Too Close for Comfort."
In 1958, Davis resumed his film career after a quarter-century layoff
with Anna Lucasta, followed
a year later by his acclaimed turn in Porgy and Bess. Also in 1959,
he became a charter member
of the Rat Pack, a loose confederation of Sinatra associates (also including
Dean Martin,
Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop) which began regularly performing together
at the Sands
Casino in Las Vegas. In 1960, they made Ocean's Eleven, the first in
a series of hip and
highly self-referential Rat Pack films. Although Davis' inclusion in
the group was perceived
in many quarters as an egalitarian move, many black audiences felt he
was simply a
token -- the butt of subtly racist jokes -- and declared him a sellout.
His earlier conversion to
Judaism had been met with considerable controversy within the African-American
community as well.
Still, nothing compared to the public outcry over his 1960 marriage
to Swedish actress May Britt,
which even elicited death threats. Still, Davis remained a major star,
appearing in the 1962 Rat Pack film
Sergeants 3 and scoring a major hit with "What Kind of Fool Am I?" Two
years later, he returned to
Broadway in the long-running Golden Boy, scoring a Tony nomination for
his performance.
In 1964, the third Rat Pack film, Robin and the Seven Hoods, was released.
Two years later,
in the wake of the publication of his autobiography, Yes I Can, Davis
was also among a number
of musical luminaries, including Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, who co-starred
in the jazz drama
A Man Called Adam. In 1968 he and Lawford teamed as the titular characters
in Salt and Pepper.
The picture was a hit, and a sequel, One More Time, appeared in 1970.
In between the last two films,
Davis delivered one of his most memorable screen performances in Bob
Fosse's 1969 musical
Sweet Charity; he also appeared in a number of television features,
including The Pigeon, The Trackers,
and Poor Devil. In 1972, Davis topped the pop charts with "The Candy
Man," from the film Willy Wonka
and the Chocolate Factory. From 1975 to 1977, he hosted his own syndicated
variety show, Sammy and
Company, and in 1978 starred in the film Sammy Stops the World. However,
in the late '70s and through
much of the 1980s, Davis' profile diminished, and he was primarily confined
to the casino circuit,
with a 1988 comeback tour he mounted with Sinatra and Martin largely
unsuccessful.
His appearance in the 1989 film Tap was much acclaimed, but it was to
be his last screen
performance -- a lifelong smoker, Davis died of cancer on May 16, 1990.
Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

SAMMY DAVIS JR. - PART II

The son of two of Vaudeville dancers, Sammy Davis Jr. hit the boards
while he was a toddler, entrancing audiences
with his dancing, singing and impressions. Davis toured for much of
his early career with his father, Sammy Davis
and the man he often referred to as his uncle, Will Mastin. Occasionally
other -- white -- performers would protest at
sharing dressing rooms or billing with the Will Mastin Trio. Davis'
father and uncle would tell young Sammy not to
pay attention: "he's just jealous because 'cause we got a better act,"
or "They don't like us 'cause we're in show business."
Because he didn't attend school and because he spent most of his youth
on the road, Davis' childhood was sheltered
from the racial segregation that was the reality in the United States
at the early part of the 20th century.
A stint in the Army opened Davis' eyes to the reality in a way that
would make an indelible mark on his life.
Overnight the world looked different. It wasn't one color anymore. I
could see the protection I'd gotten all my life from
my father and Will. I appreciated their loving hope that I'd never need
to know about prejudice and hate, but they were
wrong. It was as if I'd walked through a swinging door for eighteen
years, a door which they had always secretly held
open. In his shock, Davis responded with his fists. "I must have had
a knock-down-drag-out fight every two days and
I was getting pretty good with my fists. I had scabs on my knuckles
for the first three months in the Army."
Before very long the then 115-pound Davis found that even when he emerged
victorious from his brawls, it did little
to earn the respect he craved and the equality he felt was deserved.
Because he was a professional performer,
Davis was asked to be part of a special performance for his fellow GIs.
The success of his participation made him
realize, as others have, that "the spotlight erased all color" and gave
him the key he would use to unlock scores of
doors throughout his career. "My talent was the weapon, the power, the
way for me to fight. It was the one way I
might hope to affect a man's thinking."
Sammy Davis Jr., who died of throat cancer in 1990, would go on to enjoy
an immense career. He was truly a star;
an entertainer who basked in the limelight as well as the freedoms it
created. The freedoms, however, were
sometimes bittersweet. It is unimaginable to us now to think about a
headlining Las Vegas act not permitted a room
in the hotel where they played or even a peek into the casino. Or, when
playing Miami Beach after the first wave
of his success and encountering a sign in the lobby of the hotel he'd
chosen advising would-be customers
"No Niggers -- No Dogs," as though one might be somehow equated with
the other.
"I've got to get bigger," he told his father. "I've got to get so big,
so powerful, so famous, that the day will come when
they'll look at me and see a man -- and then somewhere along the line
they'll notice he's a Negro."
The comeuppance would come later when Davis, in his quiet way, would
help lead the way to desegregation.
For many years he looked forward to the day when he would be a big enough
star to not only insist that he stay in
the Las Vegas hotel he was headlining, but that he play to a desegrated
audience and, when he did, he reveled
in the sweetness of the feeling.
Sammy: An Autobiography is, in some ways, the rehashing of work that
has been previously published.
Portions of the book are from Yes I Can, published in 1965 and from
Why Me? from 1980. Both memoirs were
co-written with his friends and biographers Jane and Burt Boyar. Burt
Boyar has written a prologue and epilogue
and added in some previously unpublished interview material. To be honest,
if this were a weaker biography of a
less interesting performer it would seem a wasted effort. However, Sammy
seems an even more important work
now than it did when the previously seen components were first published.
We get to see how far we've come and,
in the freshness of the tone and the familiarity of some of the situations,
we get to see how far we have yet to go.
"Why do I have to play a part that depends on color?" Davis asks his
agent in the late 1950s when he's looking
towards a television role. "Why can't I play something where the fact
that I'm a Negro has no bearing either way?
Why must a special part be written for a Negro? .... I die every time
I read in the papers about some cat on Broadway
who says, 'What we need is integrated theater. Authors should write
in more parts for Negroes.' That's not integrated
theater. Really integrated theater will be when an actor -- colored
or white -- is hired to play a part."
Sammy is a spirited look at a dynamic and talented performer. His personal
life was interesting -- best friends with
Frank Sinatra, a key member of the Rat Pack as well as the requisite
marriages, purchases and addictions -- but
Sammy really shines through Davis' candid retelling of the color battles
he fought as well as the control he took of
his talent and, as a result, of his career. A moving book worthy of
this freshened-up edition. - February 2001Reviewed by Adrian Marks
author and journalist.

Fred Benjamin
A Classic in Black

Born: September 8, 1944
Occupation: dancer, choreographer, instructor
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Fred Benjamin began dancing at age four
at Elma Lewis' School of Fine Arts
in Roxbury. Benjamin danced with Talley Beatty from 1963 until 1966,
when the company folded.
Two years later, he started his own New York-based Fred Benjamin Dance
Company, which existed,
largely without funding, for 20 years. Like most African-American choreographers
of the time, Benjamin's work
was compared to that of Alvin Ailey, but Benjamin modeled himself after
his idol, Beatty. The group movement in
"Parallel Lines," the emphasis on entrances in a work such as "Our Thing,"
the signature sassiness of many
other works -- all reflected Beatty's influence. Benjamin added ballet
to Beatty's contemporary, energized
style and helped popularize the genre known as ballet-jazz. He introduced
many inner-city youth to dance via the
Harlem Cultural Council's annual DanceMobile series, but his greatest
gift may have been in teaching.
At New York's Clark Center for the Performing Arts and Steps studios,
Benjamin influenced many young dancers.
Benjamin has also worked extensively in theatrical dance. He has taught
in the Netherlands, worked in
summer stock, and danced with the June Taylor Dancers. On Broadway he
worked with Gower Champion and
Michael Bennett and performed in such hits as "Hello, Dolly!" and "Promises,
Promises."

Fuasi Abdul Khaliq
A Classic in Black

Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq has been performing professionally since 1972 when
her first played with the late great
West Coast pianist Horace Tapscott in Los Angeles, California. This led
to a lifetime relationship with Tapscott's
Pan-African People's Arkestra, during which time Fuasi served as assistant
conductor as well as arranger, composer
and player of saxophone, clarinet and flute.
During the past 20 years Fuasi has performed from coast to coast in the
U.S. and in the last 10 years in Europe,
both leading his own ensemble as well as playing with other groups as
a sideman with such greats as
Walter Bishop Jr., Arthur Blythe, Arto Tuncboyaciyan, Jimmy Garrison,
Eddie Blackwell, Ed Schuller,
Gene "Mighty Flea" Connors, Joselyn B. Smith, Rudy Stevenson, Joseph Bowie
and Abdu Salim.
His professional credits include three films, one of the most recent being
"Das Schwein" starring Götz George
and directed by Ilse Höffmann. Fuasi's theater credits include the writing
of original scores for three plays as well
as performing roles in these plays.
The music that Fuasi performs is as diverse as his musical background.
He features in his ensemble the bassist
Stanislaw Michalak from Poland, the drummer Kenny Martin from New York
and pianist Marque Löwenthal
from Boston. With this group Fuasi is performing original compositions
from all the members of the ensemble
as well as playing different and "fresh" musical pieces from established
composers and performers from around the world.

Muhammad Ali
A Classic in Black

"Ali is the one who made it possible for us to earn such huge purses.
To call him the greatest boxer of all time doesn't do him justice.
He transcended boxing and inspired all athletes.
He lifted baseball players, footballers and others, and inspired them
to greater things."George Foreman

Born 'Black'

Cassius Marcellus Clay was born on January 17, 1942 in Louisville,
Kentucky. A healthy child weighing
over six pounds, he was named after one of his forefathers, Cassius
Marcellus Clay, a plantation owner of
Kentucky and also a politician, who had once held the position of American
Ambassador at the Court of St. James.
Cassius' mother was Odessa Lee Grady.
Clay's great grandfather was an Irishman who had married a black woman.
Cassius' forefathers were of slave stock, a fact that would play a big
role in the future.
A Child From a Mediocre Family, Cassius grew up in West End Louisville,
a black-dominated area.
His parents were hard working. His father, also named Cassius Clay,
was a sign painter and his
mother worked as a cleaner and cook. The Clays were not well off. His
elder brother Rudolf or Rudy,
also helped the family by contributing his mite with odd jobs. Though
they never had to worry for their
supper, better accommodation was beyond their reach. Cassius and Rudolf
wore clothes received from
the charity organization, Good Will. The best part of it all was that
they had their own house.
Though it was not in a good condition, under the roof of this ramshackle
cottage, the close knit family led
a happy life with love and togetherness, not bothered by the hardships
they faced.
Cassius' parents were devoted to each other, in spite of their different
nature. As Cassius later wrote
about his parents, his mother Odessa Bird (a nickname given to his mother
by young Cassius) was a quiet,
homely and religious woman. In contrast, Cassius Sr. was a hep-cat (a
word used by Cassius himself
for his father). He was not only a drunkard, but also a girl chaser.
He had a history of offences related
to drunken behavior and careless driving.

First Punch
When Odessa and Cassius Sr. looked proudly at their tiny son, who walked
and talked early, they had
not in their wildest dreams envisioned his world-class heavy weight
boxing career. It is said that
Cassius' first ever boxing activity took place when the six-month-old
infant hit his mother on the face.
It is said that the punch was so hard that two of her teeth had to be
pulled out!
According to his mother, Cassius' first ever words were 'Gee Gee'. In
retrospect, Cassius later said that
he may have been trying to say "Gee Gee I'm the greatest, or it might
mean Golden Gloves."

The Foolhardy Boy
As he grew up, he and his family attended the Mount Zion Baptists Church
on Sundays. Who could have
imagined that a devout Christian would turn towards Islam in the future
to seek answers.
Physically, Cassius was a strong and able boy but quite a poor student.
Initially, he used to attend
Virginia Avenue Grade School and later the Central High School in Louisville.
At first, he blamed his
preoccupation with boxing at an early age for his poor academic record.
Later on, he confessed that
he wished he had put forth more efforts, because he had to struggle
all his life due to his slow reading ability.
Another reason for his poor results was that he used to clown around
in school. In his boyhood, he was a
prankster and practical joker. His pranks were aimed mainly to frighten
his parents. Sometimes, he would
put a bed sheet over his head and jump at them from a closet. At times,
he would tie a string to a bedroom
curtain and when his parents went to bed, he would immediately move
it, creating a ghost like image.
His playfulness resulted in poor marks at the school examinations. But
his sportive ability found its
own way in what can be called a violent and male dominated game - Boxing.

Love Affair with Boxing
How Cassius turned to boxing is indeed very interesting. At the age
of 12, Cassius and his best friend
went cycling to town on a rainy day. The heavy rain forced them to seek
shelter at the Louisville Home Show,
at the Columbia Auditorium. It was an annual Black bazaar, where the
boys were provided with hot dogs
and candy, free of charge. While the boys were enjoying their snacks
inside, someone stole Cassius'
brand new Schwinn bike. The bewildered boys went to a policeman, Joe
Elsby Martin to report the theft.
Joe listened to them calmly and advised the frustrated youngsters to
fight for themselves.
He also offered them to join his boxing gymnasium situated in the basement
of the auditorium.

The 'Cub' Stepped into the Ring
Cassius, weighing around 112 pounds joined Martin's gym. He started
practicing boxing and that became
a part of his schedule. When the 12-year boy put on the gloves for the
first time, he understood that 'ring'
was the exit from the foggy atmosphere for the black boys prevailing
in his time. Apart from Martin, another
coach who taught boxing to Cassius was Fred Stoner. To move around quickly,
using legs with the grace of
a dancer was the first lesson taught to Cassius. At first, Cassius was
beaten time and again, as he was short
and used to hold his gloves too low. But being an enthusiastic student,
he soon learned whatever was taught to him.
He had the natural abilities to understand the nuances of the game.
The best thing he learned was to hit the
opponent without being hit back and it was truly unique.
Not even for a single night, did he miss his practice of two hours with
Martin and then four hours with Stoner.
His reflexes were fast. His coaches were satisfied with the agility
of his hands and his 'psychology to win attitude',
which is the most important quality of any winning sportsperson.

First Bout
Cassius' coach Joe Martin would search for new talent and present them
in his amateur boxing show on TV
called Tomorrow's Champions. Only six weeks after Cassius joined the
gym, Martin booked him for a fight
against a white boxer, Ronny O' Keefe and Cassius won his first official
bout on a split decision.
The show was broadcast all over Kentucky. The audience who watched Cassius
perform live, didn't like him
because he bragged about how strong he was and that no one could beat
him.
Following his first victory, Martin booked him on the show regularly.
Every week, Cassius had a new opponent.
Conscious of his short stature, the clever boy tried a new tactic by
composing short poems using his poetic
skills and spoke loudly in the ring. Influenced by his father's creativity
in making slogans for signboards,
Cassius was successful in combining the two, boxing and poetry:

This guy must be done
I'll stop him in one.

About his style of bragging in the ring, Cassius later said, "Almost
from my fights, I'd mouth off to anybody
who would listen about what I was going to do to whoever I was going
to fight. People would go out of their
way to come and see, hoping I would get beaten. When I was no more than
a kid fighter, they would put me
in bills because I was a drawing card."

Becomes National Champion
Cassius' style was different from the rest. He was faster than most
of his opponents. Not using his hands
to guard himself, instead he held them at waist height while dodging
from the flurry of punches by his
opponent, with his deft footwork and reflexes. To build up stamina,
he used to eat a lot and visit the gym regularly.
He developed a Herculean type physique, weighing in at 175 pounds, required
for any light-heavyweight boxer.
Subsequently, he won many fights in a series, gaining perfection with
every fight. Until 1960, he had won 100 out
of 108 fights, winning six Kentucky State Golden Gloves tournaments.
At the end of 180 amateur fights, he had
earned the National Golden Gloves and the National Amateur Athletic
Union (AAU) titles, twice.
Steadily moving towards international exposure, he beat a Black army
champion Allen Hudson at the Cow Palace
in San Francisco. In that Olympic trial match, he attacked so ferociously
that the referee had to stop the match
way before the last round. Cassius Clay was declared the best light
heavyweight boxer of the United States of America.
He packed his bags for the 1960 Rome Olympics to represent USA.

To Rome
The year 1960 was a golden year for Cassius Clay. On one side, he got
a chance to participate in the Olympics
and on the other side, he graduated with rank 367 out of 391 students
of his class from the Central High School
getting a diploma, inscribed a mere 'Certificate of Attendance.'
It is indeed hard to believe that the No. 1 amateur boxer in the USA
was afraid of flying. Cassius was not even
ready to step on the plane. An author, David Remnick wrote, Joe Martin,
Cassius' coach had to spend four
hours at the aerodrome to convince his lion hearted boxer that there
was no railway to Rome! At last, Cassius
boarded the plane to Italy. He had equipped himself with a parachute,
which he purchased himself, and which
he kept wearing and did not take off during the entire flight!
But the moment he found himself at the Olympic village, Cassius immediately
regained his courage and his
boastful speech. From the first day in the Eternal City of Rome, he
attracted many athletes and mediapersons,
with his bragging style. He began to prepare himself for the glorious
future, destined for him.
Because of his confident foretelling, Cassius became a hot favorite
overnight and was bestowed with the title
'Mayor of the Olympic Village', by the local public. Some of his fellow
athletes, smoldered with the feeling of
neglect on being ignored by the media. Such was his ability to attract
the media and the public by his outspokenness and charisma.

Olympic Gold
When the bout started, Cassius entered the ring full of confidence.
As A. J. Liebling wrote, "just when the
sweet science appears to lie like a painted ship upon a painted ocean,
a new Hero comes along like a
Mortan tug to pull it out of the ocean." Cassius implemented his strategy
to threaten his opponents,
repeatedly shouting slogans while fighting against them.
His favorite slogan that became synonymous with him thereafter was:

I'm the greatest.

Cassius' first victory was against a Belgian boxer, Yvon Bacus. His
next fight was a little tougher as
his Russian opponent Gennady Shatkot was more experienced than Cassius.
But Cassius, who had
learned never to give up, won not only that fight but went on
to beat the Australian boxer Tonny Madign in the semi-finals, enroute
to the final.
The final was the bloodiest battle fought in the Olympics. Cassius faced
a Polish boxer Zbigniew Piertrzkowski
who was a veteran of over 200 fights. At the beginning, Cassius seemed
in trouble because Piertrzkowski
was a southpaw and Cassius lacked the experience in battling a left-handed
boxer. Even at the end of
the second round, Clay found no succor and had lost all except, hope.
But after the last and third round, Cassius'
gloves and his opponent's trunks were covered with Piertrzkowski's blood.
The audience saw the Pole,
hanging on the ropes, defenseless. Cassius won the Olympic Gold, his
first big achievement in life at an international venue.
While returning to the USA, Clay was not frightened of flying,
instead he happily wrote a poem on the plane expressing his patriotism:

To make America the greatest is my goal,
So I beat the Russian, and I beat the Pole,
And for USA won the Medal of Gold.
Italians said, 'You're greatest than the Cassius of Old.'
We like your name, we like your game,
So make Rome your home if you will.
I said I appreciate kind hospitality
But the USA is my country still,
'Cause they waiting to welcome me in Louisville.

Back in USA, the people welcomed their 'hero' with great enthusiasm
at the airport in New York.
The newspapers highlighted the great achievement of the boy with the
imperial Roman name,
Cassius Clay - the best amateur light-heavyweight boxer in the world.

Turning Professional
During one of his fights at the Olympics, Cassius had challenged Floyd
Patterson, the then heavyweight
world champion. Patterson was among the crowd of spectators assembled
to welcome him. As Cassius saw him,
he shouted out : "Patterson, some day I'm going to whup you. I am the
greatest."
And Patterson had smilingly answered : "You're a good kid, keep trying
kid."
Cassius remained preoccupied with Patterson's reply. Another event that
stimulated his desire to
fight Patterson happened in Kentucky when one day, he was passing through
the Manhattan amusement arcade.
Suddenly, he saw a machine, which was showing phony news headlines for
23 cents. Cassius found
it interesting and paid the sum. The headline appeared on the screen:

Cassius signs for Patterson fight.

Cassius read it, and made up his mind that he would practice heavyweight
boxing.
Some famous professional heavyweight trainers offered to train him.
Archie Moore, former world heavyweight champion sent a message:
"If you want a good, experienced manager, call me, collect."
A well known heavyweight boxer Rocky Marciano sent a telegram, which
read, "You have the promise.
I can give you the guidance." Even, Cus D' Amato, a coach of Floyd Patterson,
also took interest in Clay.
Meanwhile, in the same year, he signed a contract with Bill Faversham,
a Louisville businessman and a boxing fan.
A contract with 11 millionaires from Louisville, called 'Louisville
Sponsoring Group', was to run for six years.
Cassius was given $ 10,000 as an advance. With a portion of it, Cassius
bought a Cadillac for his parents,
the rest he spent on renovation of their old Kentucky home. Moreover,
Clay would get 50 per cent of his future
income, as per the conditions of contract.
Now, Clay had enough financial support, but still he couldn't choose
his manager. Bill Faversham was impatient
to bring Cassius into the ring. So he arranged his first professional
bout on October 29, 1960, against Tunney Hunsaker,
a white sheriff of Virginia. In the fight that lasted six rounds, Cassius
won, but his performance was without charm.
After this unconvincing victory, Cassius was pressed to get a manager
by his sponsors. His father rejected Joe Martin,
because he did not trust the policeman. Faversham chose Archie Moore,
the ex-heavyweight champion.
Cassius refused to join his camp for two reasons : Moore's gym was in
the mountains near San Diego, California.
It was a place of quietude and Cassius was not habituated for such environment.
And the second, more important
reason was, Moore tried to change his style, and to get him away from
professional fights until he was ready,
suggesting that Cassius would need to train for years. Cassius couldn't
wait for such a long time. He went back to
Louisville, giving the reason of Christmas celebrations.
Meanwhile, he received another management offer from a much experienced
Italian coach, Angelo Dundee.
Dundee's trainee list included the name of ex-world light–heavyweight
champion Willie Pastrano. Cassius had known
Dundee for two years and once had sought some valuable tips from him
regarding boxing. At the end of 1960,
Cassius went to Miami Beach to meet Dundee and became his disciple.
Dundee didn't try to change Cassius'
natural style, but instead nourished it. It turned out to be the greatest
pair of trainer boxer, history had witnessed.

Poetic Predictor
Cassius' next four bouts gave ample evidence of his improvement. He
got a lot of media attention by winning
all the subsequent fights with knockouts. After a number of fights,
he began to show his confidence, that all his
opponents would fall in the round he presumed. Now, Cassius became a
hot favorite with the media. He was
presumed to secure the world heavyweight title, although he was ranked
nine in the list of heavyweight boxers.
The first important opponent in Cassius' professional career was Archie
Moore, his ex-coach. On November 16, 1962,
20-year old Clay switched to 48-year Moore. Before his bout, Cassius
came out with his poetic prediction:

When you come to the fight
Don't block the halls
And don't block the door
For Y'all may go home
After round four.

And Moore did not last till the fifth round as Cassius had predicted.
With this victory, Cassius had predicted his
11th win correctly. Until March 1963, his prophecies proved correct.
Before the fight against Doug Jones, Cassius,
the 'loudmouth' (an adjective given to Clay by some media person) challenged
his opponent, publicly:

Jones likes to mix,
So I'll let it go six.
If he talks jive,
I'll cut it to five.
And if he talks some more,
I'll cut it to four.

In a jam packed-Madison Square Garden in New York, Cassius asked Jones,
"How tall are you ?" Jones asked angrily,
"Why do you want to know ?" Cassius answered, "So, I'll know how far
to step back when I knock you out in the fourth."
But this time, Cassius failed to fulfil his prediction, as Jones survived
up to the sixth round. The audience booed him,
shouting 'Fake!' When the match ended, Cassius had one more victory
in his pocket, a victory by a 'whisker'.
After the Clay Jones fight, fans seemed to be unimpressed with Clay's
predictions. Soon it was over with his next fight.
An English fight promoter, Jack Solomons, arranged a fight between Clay
and the European champion Henry Cooper,
affectionately known as 'Enery'. Cassius, weighing 207 pounds,
entered the ring shouting he would defeat Cooper, 'a bum and a cripple',
in round five.
In the first round, Cooper punched Cassius' nose. It started bleeding.
After three rounds, Cooper swung in with his
most famous and effective, wild left hook. It was the hardest Cassius
had ever faced. He fell back, dangling on the ropes.
When the bell rang declaring the end of the fourth round, Cassius could
hardly stand on his legs.
His trainer Dundee helped him to recover in the regular 60-second break.
Prior to the start of the fifth round,
Dundee noticed a rip in Cassius' glove. As per boxing rules the gloves
must be in good condition.
It took another 60 seconds to replace the gloves. The fifth round became
the last for Cooper. Cassius, an injured lion,
came back with a vengeance and one of his blows opened a cut above Cooper's
left eye making Cooper nearly blind.
The air in the auditorium was filled with the smell of Cooper's blood.
Cassius showered a flurry of punches on Cooper.
It was becoming unbearable, not only for Cooper but also for the spectators.
The actress Elizabeth Taylor,
who was present there, screamed, to stop the match. Cooper was covered
with a red mask. Cassius, seemingly
unstoppable attacked again and again until the referee stopped the match,
announcing him the winner. Cassius'
prediction had once again come true.

The World Champion
After the match with Cooper, when Cassius was waving to the booing crowd,
two eagle eyes were watching him.
They belonged to Jack Nilon, manager of the then World Heavyweight Champion
Sonny Liston. After the match,
Nilon went to meet Cassius in the dressing room with a message given
by Liston. The message was : "Please, drink
your orange juice and your milk shakes. Stay well and healthy. You talked
yourself into a world title fight."
Sonny Liston, a former prisoner, reigned in the heavyweight category.
Two years earlier, he had dethroned Floyd Patterson.
Liston had routed his opponent in a match that lasted only two minutes
and six seconds. He seemed invincible
as he had lost only one professional fight in his career. Now, what
was needed for Clay was more perfection.
Luckily, he got Drew 'Bundini' Brown as his motivator and court jester,
and they remained together from then on.
Until 1964, Clay had achieved victories in all his 19 professional bouts,
16 of them by KOs. Cassius and Brown
together invented the slogan that became a synonym of Clay's boxing
style:

Float like a butterfly And sting like a bee!

Cassius tried hard to attract the media attention before he signed
a contract for the Liston v/s Clay fight.
He began taunting Liston, making fun of his appearance and predicted
that he would demolish the champ in eight rounds:

King Liston will stay
Until he meets Cassius Clay
Moore fell in four
Liston in eight.

He tried a new trick to tease Liston by driving a bus around America.
On the top of the bus a slogan was painted by his father:

Cassius Clay - World's Most Colorful Fighter

And under that slogan, another one was drawn:

Sonny Liston is Great
But He'll Fall in Eight

The most awaited bout was scheduled for February 25, 1964, in Miami.
The match attracted a lot of hype, largely due to Clay's boastful rhymes:

Clay comes out to meet Liston
And Liston starts to retreat
If Liston goes back any further
He'll end up in a ringside seat.
Clay swings with a left,
Clay swings with a right,
Look at your Cassius
Carry the fight.
Liston keeps backing
But there's not enough room
It's a matter of time.
There, Clay lowers the boom.
Now Clay swings with a right,
What a beautiful swing,
And the punch raises the bear,
Clear out of the ring.
Liston is still rising
And the ref wears a frown,
For he can't start counting,
Till Sonny comes down.
Now Liston disappears from view.
The crowd is getting frantic,
But our radar stations have picked him up.
He's somewhere over the Atlantic.
Who would have thought
When they came to the fight
That they'd witness the launching
Of a human satellite?
Yes, the crowd did not dream
When they laid down their money
That they would see
A total eclipse of the Sonny!
I am the greatest !

Until the morning of weigh-in for the match, Cassius seemed crazy
with pre-bout tension. During medical check-up,
his pulse was found to be 120 a minute and was certified as a person
- 'scared to death'. This thing had the desired
effect on his opponent, who started presuming that Clay was nothing
other than a loudmouth youngster and he (Liston)
would win before the fourth round. Very few believed that Cassius had
a chance. The night of the fight the odds seemed
to favor Liston as the book makers had declared him the hot favorite
by 7-1.
At last, the most awaited fight began. Liston did not know how fast
Cassius was. Indeed, Clay didn't give Liston a
chance to throw a single punch. He danced around him like a butterfly.
Whenever Liston tried to hit him, Clay would
float away. An exhausted Liston was breathing hard in the third round.
Cassius began to hit him and hit a big punch
under the left eye. During the fight, Cassius also had trouble in his
eyes, and even he wanted to quit. But his manager
Dundee stopped him and shouted: 'No way, get in there and fight.'
Cassius, at his coach's command, continued fighting. He exhibited great
grace, beauty of strength and control
in the ring. In the sixth round, his vision became clear again. He used
his quick fists to frustrate the champ and Liston,
claiming a badly hurt shoulder, did not come out of the corner for the
seventh round. When the bell sounded,
Liston was like a fallen statue, unable to move. It was a historical
moment in the world of boxing as Cassius Marcellus Clay,
a 22-year American boy was proclaimed as the second youngest heavyweight
boxer to win the World Championship Title.
As Cassius first realized this fact, he ran around the ring and shouted
at the media persons, "Who is the greatest ?
Eat your words ! - shook up the world!"
This was a solid beginning to his long and successful career.
In an interview with Sports Illustrated magazine, Ali confidently said:
"If you wonder what the difference between
(other heavyweight boxers) and me is, I'll break the news : you never
heard of them. I'm not saying they're
not good boxers. Most of them ... can fight almost as good as I can.
I'm just saying you never hear of them.
And the reason for that is because they cannot throw the jive.
Cassius Clay is a boxer who can throw the jive better than anything."

Birth of Muhammad Ali
In 1964, Cassius Clay converted to Islam. The most recognizable and
most outspoken athlete in the world declared,
the very day after his triumph as the World Heavyweight Champion,
that he had joined the Nation of Islam, a popular Black organization.
Most of the White people in America were stunned by the news. They couldn't
believe their
champ was not a Christian anymore. The Nation of Islam, whose leader
was Elijah Muhammad,
favored the liberation of the Blacks from slavery and subjugation, saying
they should claim their own territory
in the US instead. The Black Muslims were considered to be the 'militants'
of the civil rights movements that
was at its peak in America at the time. It was due to the efforts of
Malcolm X, the most charismatic minister of the
Nation of Islam that it was revealed only after the Clay-Liston bout
that Clay had joined Muslim secret meetings for the last three years.
An important event that played a vital role in his decision to convert
occurred three years prior, when Cassius
had been denied employment at a soda fountain counter because he was
a black. Disgusted with racism in
his own country, Cassius had thrown his Olympic gold medal into a river.
Cassius later said with disappointment,
"That gold medal didn't mean a thing to me if my black brothers and
sisters were treated wrong in a country
I was supposed to represent." After this event, Cassius came in
touch with Malcolm X at Miami and decided to join the Nation of Islam.
At first, he changed his name to 'Cassius X'. Here, 'X' meaning the
unknown family name of his ancestors
who were brought to USA from Africa as slaves. But after four weeks,
Elijah Muhammad gave him a new name.
Now, the world would recognize Cassius Clay as Muhammad Ali, meaning
Beloved of Allah.
The reaction was what he had presumed. His 'good boy' image took a beating.
Many Americans started
looking at 'bad Muhammad Ali' as a member of a militant sect. Many Americans,
including journalists kept
calling Ali by his original name - Cassius Clay - and rooted for him
to lose at upcoming matches.
Yet Ali, firm in his decision, continued to march on the path of his
chosen career.

Marital Knot
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1964, there were changes in his personal
affairs. In July, he met a beautiful woman.
She was Sonji Roi, a model and a cocktail waitress. On August 14, 1964,
Ali married her in Gray, Indiana.
For their honeymoon, the couple went on a tour of Africa. The fairy
tale marriage didn't last more than a year as a result
of their personal conflicts and Ali being extremely loyal to the Nation
of Islam.
It resulted in the annulment of their marriage, soon after his rematch
with Sonny Liston in 1965.

The Phantom Punch
Clay, now weighing in at 245 pounds, was back in the ring with a new
name and radiating confidence.
A disastrous event happened just three days before the match. During
a fight against Jimmy Ellis,
he took a heavy low blow and suffered hernia. Immediately, Ali was admitted
to the hospital. As a result,
the Ali Liston bout was postponed. Finally, it took place on May 25,
1965. What happened in the two minute
bout is still a matter of controversy. In a dramatic first round, Ali
swung with his infamous blow that later
became famous as the 'phantom punch'. Ali hit Liston so hard squarely
on the jaw, that Liston flopped on the
mat within a fraction of a second. Referee Jersey Joe Walcott could
not pick up the timekeeper's count and
allowed the fight to continue. Nat Fleischer, one of the journalists
sitting in the press box, alerted the referee
about the error and the match was immediately stopped. But the controversial
'phantom punch' made the
critics cry foul. Even former champ Joe Louis stated that Ali was part
of a racist organization and that he
lacked the skills to compete with past 'great persons' like him and
Rocky Marciano. Some people started
believing that Liston had lost the bout intentionally, because there
was a rumor that some Black Muslims had
threatened to shoot him if he won. Nevertheless, Ali was the winner
and the victory had added another feather
in his cap, while defending his heavyweight title.
In retrospect, Floyd Patterson, who had been the world heavyweight champion
twice, began criticizing Ali
and the Black Muslims. He made a controversial statement,
"I am willing to fight, just so I can bring the championship back to
America."
And the inevitable Ali Patterson fight was held at Las Vegas, on November
22, 1965. Ali had knocked out
Patterson twice before. This time he answered Patterson's wish to fight
against him in a very ridiculous manner:

I'm gonna put him flat on his back,
so that he will start acting black.
Because when he was champ
he didn't do as he should
He tried to force himself
into an all white neighborhood.

And Ali did it. In 12 rounds, he finished the match. Once again the
critics had to accept the fact that Ali was the champ.
In 1966, Ali successfully faced five fighters in the ring : George Chuvalo
in Canada, Henry Cooper and Brian London
in England, German champion Karl Milden Berger in Frankfurt and Cleveland
Williams in Houston. The monstrous
matches against WBA champion Ernie Terrell and tough fighter Cleveland
Williams, validated his claim as the greatest
pound-for-pound boxer of all time.

The Champ - Without A Title
Throughout this time, Ali was shrouded in controversies arising from
his involvement with the Nation of Islam.
He had another battle to face the following year. This time outside
the ring. The ''act'' had been staged two years ago,
when Ali was called to serve for the US armed forces. He had failed
to pass the mental aptitude test at a military
induction center in Florida and classified 1-Y, meaning unfit for service.
But later on, the US armed forces required
more soldiers for the ongoing Vietnam War and the pass-percentage marks
for the soldier's test had been dropped to 15.
All of a sudden, Ali was classified 1-A, meaning fit for service.
On April 28, 1967, his name was announced at the induction center on
San Jacinto Street, Houston; 'Cassius Clay - Army.'
Ali refused to co-operate with the draft and did not join the armed
forces saying he was a member of Nation of Islam,
which was a pacifist organization. When asked by journalists, he simply
replied,
"I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Congs. No Viet Cong ever called
me nigger".
This is probably the most famous statement ever made by Ali.
The reaction was quick. The so-called patriotic fans and sports journalists
precipitated a tremendous outcry
against him. Ali was charged for violating the Selective Service Act
by the US government and was sentenced
to five years imprisonment and fined $100,000. On appeal, he could save
himself from jail, but the worst thing
that happened to him was his exile from the boxing world. The World
Boxing Association stripped him of his title
and boxing license. Moreover, his passport was impounded by the government
to ensure he did not box abroad.
Reflecting upon this period Sports Illustrated published, "The noise
became a din, the drumbeats of holy war.
TV and radio commentators, little old ladies… bookmakers, and parish
priests, armchair strategists at the Pentagon
and politicians all over the place joined in a crescendo of get-Cassius
clamor."
Ali, who had earned millions in the ring, was soon in financial trouble.
The helpless, but not hopeless guy opened
his heart in an interview to Edwin Shrake for Sports Illustrated : "I'm
giving up my title, my wealth, maybe my future.
Many great men have been tested for their religious beliefs. If I pass
this test, I'll come out stronger than ever."

His great will power has been exhibited in his poem:

Keep asking, no matter how long
On the war in Vietnam I sing this song
I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet-Cong.
Clean out my cell
And take my tail to jail
'Cause better to be in jail fed
Than to be in Vietnam, dead.

Ali was no longer the titleholder. But to the true boxing fans, he
was still the champ.
Ali had no fights for three years. It was a big loss for him as he was
at the peak of his career then.
Meanwhile, he married 17-year-old, Belinda Boyd, a Black Muslim from
Chicago. He had first met Boyd
when he visited her school in 1961. After his second marriage, Ali had
to look for other sources of income,
as he wasn't allowed to box. Soon he found a way. He started giving
speeches at colleges and universities.
In most of the lectures, he would explain his vision regarding war or
segregation of Blacks.
His lectures would attract huge audiences. Soon he became the third
most charismatic speaker in America,
the first two being US Senators Edmund Muskie and Edward Kennedy.
Although, the income from his lectures fell short of his legal fees,
he also tried acting and gave public appearances.
He acted as a leading actor in the Broadway Musical Buck White. Moreover,
a computer bout between him and
Rocky Marciano and a documentation of his life provided enough financial
support for Ali.
The only unfortunate thing that happened was his failure in the venture
of 'Champburger' chain of fast food restaurants.

Back to the Ring
During this period, new heavyweight champions Jimmy Ellis and Joe Frazier
had captured Ali's place.
But boxing seemed to lack charm without Ali. Ali never regretted his
decision not to join the US army.
Whenever he was asked if he missed boxing, his answer would be : "No.
Boxing misses me."
It was true. Boxing was missing Ali. During his exile, Black and non-Black
Americans began to feel that Ali
should be allowed to enter the ring again. As an echo of the sentiments
of the masses, the Supreme Court
overturned his conviction, on June 20, 1970. Ali received his passport
and license and returned to the ring
after a three and half years in exile.
In October 1970, the first fight after his exile was held in Atlanta,
against a tough promising fighter Jerry Quarry.
Roaring like a lion, Ali jumped into the ring. The hearts of the spectators
missed a beat for a moment.
Quarry was disposed of in three rounds, because he got a huge cut above
his eyes that was bleeding heavily.
After this non-artistic match, Ali faced a strong boxer from Argentina,
Oscar Bonavena. He was so stubborn that
even after being hit, he would get wilder and full of energy without
showing any sign of weakness.
The boring fight lasted 15 rounds. It ended with Bonavena's impressive
knock out.
For Ali, these matches were just like a pre-war preparation.

A true challenge was yet to come.Fight of the Century

During Ali's exile, 'Smokin' Joe Frazier, a former slaughterhouse
worker, had become the new WBA heavyweight champion.
Since Ali didn't lose his title in the ring, his fans believed that
Ali was still the champ. So it became necessary that
an Ali-Frazier fight should take place.
The curiosity ended on March 8, 1971. The most challenging fight scheduled
in Madison Square Garden, New York City,
where two undefeated champions were going head to head. The fight was
going to be a big event, because both the
opponents were guaranteed the previously unheard of sum of $ 2.5 million
each. For the promotion of this most important fight,
Ali used his old psyching trick. Like every time, he could not stop
himself from teasing his opponent:

Joe's gonna come out smokin,
But I ain't gonna be jokin,
I'll be pickin and pockin
Pouring water on his smokin,
This might shock and amaze ya
But I'm gonna destroy Joe Frazier.

Despite this comment, Frazier gave a tough fight, without getting
disturbed. In the early rounds, Ali came out fast, as expected.
Surprisingly, his fists could not damage the iron man Frazier. In return,
Frazier started hitting Ali with vicious punches after the
fourth round. Ali lost his speed and collapsed, absorbing the punishment
that he never had before. In the 15th round,
Frazier planted a bone-crushing left hook on Ali's jaw that sprawled
him. His right cheek was badly damaged.
Frazier was declared the winner. It was Ali's first professional loss,
but he was not ready to quit.
The defeat was followed by a new victory, outside the ring. On June
29, 1971, Ali got the news that the US Supreme Court
had reversed his conviction for draft dodging, and had dismissed all
criminal charges against him. An eclipse was over.
Now, he was going to open a new, more colorful chapter of his career.

Fighting on and on
After being defeated by Frazier, Ali had to prove that he was still
'The Greatest'. He won three fights in 1971,
which included pocketing the North American Heavyweight Title. Then
in 1972, he defeated six opponents and all this time,
he continued to tell the mediapersons that he would surely meet Frazier
and compel him to accept his [Ali's] greatness.
The year 1973 was a tragic one for Ali, when he faced Ken Norton. Ali's
arrogance stopped him from taking the fight seriously.
He trained himself for just three weeks before the fight. On the day
of the bout, Ali was put in a humiliating situation when Norton,
comparatively an unknown boxer, broke his jaw in the second round.
Soon after his jaw healed, he recharged himself with all his skills
and speed,
beating Norton in a rematch held in the same year at Los Angeles, on
September 10.
In 1974, Ali faced his rival Joe Frazier for the second time. Frazier
had recently lost his title in Jamaica against a young,
giant killer George Foreman. Both boxers tried to influence each other
before the fight, as they had done earlier.
The fight was noted more for its pre-fight brawl in a studio during
a TV appearance than for the action in the ring.
The Ali Frazier bout, the richest non-title fight in the history was
not as brutal as the first one.
Ali won by a unanimous decision, once again proving that he was still
a creditable fighting force.

Rumble in the Jungle
The victory over Joe Frazier put Ali on the stage, where the next challenge
was ready to welcome him.
It was the World's No. 1 heavyweight boxer George Foreman. Seemingly,
the most ferocious and invincible
champ then, Ali's target was clear. He had to get his title back.
When Ali was preparing to battle, some people, even his keenest supporters
wondered whether he could
survive against a powerful puncher like Foreman. But Ali was confident
of winning the world championship crown.
His manager Dundee and he discussed their original plan, to dance around
Foreman and attack
him from long range. Moreover, he did the same thing that he had done
in the past. He came up with his new rhyme:

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned?
Wait till I whup George Foreman's behind.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
His hands can't hit what his eyes can't see
Now you see me, now you don't
George thinks he will, but I know he won't.
I done wrassled with an alligator
I done tussled with a whale
Only last week I murdered a rock
Injured a stone, hospitalized a brick
I'm so mean I make medicine sick.

On the night of October 30, 1974, Ali tangled with Foreman at Kinshasa
in Zaire, a country in the 'heart of darkness',
in Central Africa. Mobutu, the dictator of Zaire provided $ 5 million
for each fighter, which was double than what they
received for their first fight. Both the contenders exhibited their
best.
Since Ali's ancestors belonged to the land, he would attract black people.
Some 70,000 spectators had gathered in the soccer stadium at Kinshasa.
The fight was to be broadcast live on TV.
As both contenders entered into the ring, people began screaming,
"Ali, boma aye-yay !" meaning "Ali, knock him down and kill him !"
The audience sympathy was totally in favor of Ali, as Foreman was always
surrounded with Germans and
kept himself away from strangers, whereas Ali was totally different.
Witty, funny and expert in seeking
love from people. As the fight began, Ali utilized the same strategy
against Foreman, which he had used against
Sonny Liston some 10 years ago. But this time he didn't show his footwork.
Whenever Foreman tried to hit him,
Ali would lie on the ropes, actually inviting Foreman to hit him. The
wise thing he did was to protect his
face with the gloves, his kidneys and belly with his arms and elbows.
Later, Foreman admitted that he had hit Ali
as hard as he could, but he didn't go down.
Ali's 'rope-a-dope' strategy proved to be successful. In the eighth
round, he came off the ropes and attacked
Foreman with a perfect combination and all his strength. Before Foreman
could comprehend what was happening,
he found himself sprawled in the center of the ring by Ali's powerful
punch on his jaw. It was Foreman's first career
knockout defeat. The Rumble in the Jungle was over. Ali had done the
impossible.
He became the first boxer since Floyd Patterson to regain the heavyweight
title, after seven years.
The rule for the champs, 'They never come back' was broken. His victory
compelled many of his past critics
to shut their mouths. He was also invited by the US President to visit
the White House.
The entire event of the Ali Foreman fight was an inspiration for'' When
We Were Kings'', a 1996 award-winning documentary.
His next opponent was 35-year-old Chuck Wepner who held out against
Ali's attacks for almost 15 rounds.
Referee Tony Perez stopped the fight in the last round. Wepner was admired
by many, even impressed the
Hollywood star Sylvester Stallone to come out with Rocky, the movie
based on Wepner's courageous fighting.
After Wepner, Ali successfully defended his title against Ron Lyle in
Las Vegas and Joe Burgner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Nine months after his fight against George Foreman, he fought another
exciting match.

Thrilla in Manila
Many people, even from his side, thought that Ali would quit the ring,
but Ali was still willing to fight for many years to come.
He was training himself for the next challenge Joe Frazier, once again.
Before the fight known as The Thrilla in Manila, Ali prepared himself
to rout 'Smokin' Joe. A few days before the bout,
Ali had referred to the challenger as a 'gorilla' in a joint press conference
that created tension between the two giants:

It will be a killer
And a chiller
And a thrilla
When I get the gorilla
In Manila

Ali always kept a toy gorilla in his pocket. At times, he would take
out and punch it.
Ali also imitated Frazier's slang to make him angry.
Both contenders met for the third time on September 30, 1975, at Manila.
Around 20,000 spectators saw Ali,
dominating in the early rounds. These included Ali's new manager and
the son of the Nation of Islam's
leader - Herbert Muhammad, his doctor Ferdie Pacheco, Drew 'Bundini'
Brown, Ali's best friend and the
photographer Howard Bingham and also beautiful Veronica Porche, who
soon became his third wife.
The bout, held at Quezon City, on the outskirts of Manila, was a very
grueling battle and perhaps the hardest
professional fight ever seen. Throughout the bout, both men landed hard
punches. The spectators saw Ali dominating
the early rounds. In the sixth round, Frazier beat Ali so badly that
Ali felt himself 'close to death and wanted to quit in the tenth' round.
His former coach 'Bundini' Brown shouted out: "Force yourself, champ
! Go down into the well once more !"
Ali went on pounding Frazier in the succeeding rounds. When the bell
for the final round sounded,
Frazier was unable to answer it. Ali had once again defended his World
Heavyweight Title.

Losing his 'Magic'
The champ hardly survived his title defence in 1976, when he fought
against Ken Norton for the third time.
Though he won, it was considered as the result of a little mistake made
by Norton.
Later Ali admitted that he had 'almost lost the title'.
Many began to think that Ali should quit, as not much of the 'magic'
was left, he had shown against Foreman or Frazier.
Ali entered the ring once again, winning the fight against Spaniard
Alfredo Evangelista.
As Ali's boxing skills began to decline, so did his marriage. His second
wife Khaliah [Belinda] filed for divorce in the
same year and his marriage ended. A year later, he married Veronica,
one of the four poster girls who promoted the Rumble in the Jungle.
In the late 1970s, Ali's health began to deteriorate slightly. It would
have been wise for
him to retire at this point but he continued boxing.
In 1978, Ali weighing in at 242 pounds, fought against 1976 Olympic
Gold Medallist Leon Spinks.
Ali once again tried to be successful with his 'rope-a-dope' strategy,
but this time he failed. Spinks, who had fought
only seven professional bouts, didn't tire and kept punching on Ali's
arms and belly. In a huge upset,
Ali lost his crown on a split decision. It was the most unfortunate
moment for Ali as he lost his World Championship
Heavyweight title for the first and only time.
Accepting his defeat with a great sportsman spirit, Ali said, "Of all
the fights I lost in boxing, losing to Spinks hurt the most.
That's because it was my own fault. Leon fought clean, he did the best
he could. But it was embarrassing that someone
with so little fighting skills could beat me."
After seven months, on February 15, he took back his title with masterful
display of his skills. With this victory,
Ali became the only man to win the greatest prize in boxing three times.
Ali at 37 had a professional record of 59 victories and three defeats.
His skills seemed to have eroded with age,
his body so damaged and his arms so weak that he couldn't fight without
shots of novocaine. But because of his
lavish lifestyle, he always found himself in need of money.
On October 2, 1980, he put himself in the ring once again. This time,
he was to fight Larry Holmes at Las Vegas,
for the WBC title with a guaranteed purse of $ 8 million. Holmes gave
Ali a bad beating. In the 11th round,
Ali was unable to answer the bell and Holmes knocked out Ali. His manager
Dundee said, "That's all, the ballgame's over."
But it was not over. In autumn of 1981, Ali almost 40 entered the ring
for the last time. It was also a bad day for Ali,
as he lost the fight against Trevor Berbick in Nassau. It was the end
of a great career that lasted 21 years.

Boxing Still Misses Him
After hanging up his gloves, Ali steered towards political activism
and philanthropic work. He supported Jimmy Carter
and the Democratic Party. During this period, his health appeared to
be on a rapid decline. Initially, he was misdiagnosed
as having a thyroid disease. Upon another medical check-up in 1982,
Ali was diagnosed to be suffering from Parkinson's Disease.
He began treatment for the disease, which is caused by repetitive trauma
to the head,
and at times badly affects speech and muscular co-ordination.
Without any kind of disappointment, Ali commented on his condition :
"I've got Parkinson's syndrome.
I'm in no pain...If I was in perfect health, if I had won my last two
fights, if I had no problems, people would be afraid of me.
Now, they feel sorry for me. They thought I was Superman. Now, they
can say 'He's human, like us. He has problems."
Despite his much-publicized disease, Ali has been enjoying his rest
of years
peacefully with his family at his farm in Berrien Springs, Michigan,
US.
Ali has also founded WORLD (the World Organization for Right, Liberty,
and Dignity),
which fights for human rights against any kind of slavery or exploitation.
In 1996, the Olympic Committee honored Ali by choosing him to light
the Olympic torch during the opening ceremonies
of Olympic Games at Atlanta. It is considered to be the greatest reward
for any athlete in a lifetime.
Ali fought his entire life, and is still fighting on for equal rights
of Blacks and Whites. He got success in his efforts in 1999,
becoming the first boxer ever to appear on the cover of a Wheaties box.
In February 1985, he functioned as a lay diplomat and tried to secure
the release of four kidnapped Americans in Lebanon.
He has also traveled around the world as a diplomat, and is still on
the platform to influence people all over the world.
Wherever he goes, he attracts huge audiences.
The great fighter for social and racial justice, Ali is happily living
with his fourth wife, Lonnie Williams Ali,
and nine children, eight from his marriages and one adopted child. He
is accompanied by his seven daughters:
Maryum, Rasheeda and Jamilla (twins), Miya, Khaliah, Hana and Laila,
and two sons : Muhammad Jr. and Assad [adopted son].
He amuses himself by performing conjuring tricks at times.
Khaliah, one of his daughters, has successfully built up her boxing
career following in the footsteps of her champion father.
Now, Laila too has followed suit, taking up boxing as a career.
Bill Clinton, the former President of the US presented the boxing legend
with an award, celebrating a lifetime of
achievement on October 29, 2000, at the NIAF's (National Italian American
Foundation's) 25th anniversary celebration in Washington.
At the ceremony, Clinton recalled the day when Ali had lit the Olympic
flame saying,
"It was the greatest personal thrill I have ever had as an American
citizen."

Muhammad Ali, the 'Greatest of All' as he says for himself, will
forever remain truly, The People's Champ.

QuotationsI am the onliest of boxing's poet laureates.
Float like a butterfly, Sting like a bee!
It's lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and
I believe in myself.
I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that
I really was the greatest.
The man who has no imagination has no wings.
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted
30 years of his life.
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.
Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to
the bottom of his
soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when
the match is even.
It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I just
beat people up.
I don't have to be what you want me to be; I'm free to be what I want.(by www.top-biography.com)

Muhammad Ali rose from humble origins and embodied the qualities
that enabled him to become more recognizable and better known
than any king, queen or president in the world.

Joe Louis

"The Brown Bomber: The Story of Joe Louis"

Date of Birth: May 13, 1914
Date of Death: April 12, 1981
Parents: The son of an Alabama Sharecropper, called Mun Barrow, stepfather
moved them to
Detroit in 1924. Information on his mother is hard to come by.
Education: Very little, because as a child he lived in poverty
Honors and Awards: Only boxer to retire with his championship belt.
Won National Light Heavy Weight Amateur Crown of the Golden Gloves at
nineteen years old.
Joe Louis ascended to the top of the boxing world faster than any other
athlete in history.
From his "Bum of the Month" campaign to his tragic death,
Louis was one of the most interesting sports figures in history.

Known to many as the "Brown Bomber," Joe Louis Barrow was born on
May 13, 1914.
He was the son of an Alabama sharecropper, and he was close to his large
family.
He moved to Detroit in 1924, where he won the National Light Heavyweight
Amateur Crown
of the Golden Gloves at the early age of nineteen. In 1933, John Roxborough,
his manager at the time, thought his name was too long, so it was shortened
to simply Joe Louis.
In 1935, Louis turned pro. He won his first eight fights, but finally
lost to Max Schmeling,
a German who was a key part of Hitler's "Aryan Superiority". After twelve
grueling rounds,
Louis was finally defeated by Schmelling via knock out. In 1937, Louis
won the Heavyweight
Championship of the World after beating James Bradock but later said,
"I don't want nobody to call me champ until I beat Schmeling"
Joe got his chance for a rematch on June 27, 1938, and he took advantage
of it. Once the bell rang,
Louis paid no attention to his defense, and went wild on Schmeling.
He would win with a first round knock-out.
Schmeling fell to the floor two minutes and four seconds into the fight.
Louis dealt a devastating blow to Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Joe defended his title until 1942 when he served in the army.
During his service, he fought two charity bouts for military relief.
When he left the service, he defended his title again until 1949, when
he retired, still the champion.
So many victories in such a short amount of time, however, took a toll
in the form of taxes.
In Louis's entire career he earned $4,677,992, but paid $1,199,000 in
income taxes.
Unfortunately, drugs also took a toll on Louis in his final years. In
1969, he collapsed on a New York City street
and was hospitalized. The incident was credited to a "physical breakdown,"
but Louis later admitted it was caused
by his cocaine use and fear of a plot against his life.
With his health failing, Louis still went to major boxing events. On
April 12, 1981, Joe had had ringside seats
at a Larry Holms vs. Trever Berbick championship bout. After the match,
Louis went into cardiac arrest and died at age sixty-six.
During his career, Louis had many wonderful moments in his boxing career.
Joe Louis retired with the boxing title,
won his first eight matches as a pro, faced men like Rocky Marciano,
Tony Zale, Buddy Baer, and Johnny Paycheck.
He is now said to be one of the best prize fighters of all time.
Joe Louis was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954

Madonna & Child
A Classic in Black

A Loving Mother and her Sun

Dr. Carter G. Woodson
A Classic in Black

Historian
Born 1875 - Died 1950
A pioneer in the intellectual history of the Black American.

Carter Woodson was for many years with WEB DuBois, the main voice
in American Black historiography.

Born in New Canton, Virginia, Woodson attended Bere College, the University
of Chicago, Harvard and the Sorbonne in Paris.
He and others organized the association for the study of Negro life
and history in 1915.

In 1921, Woodson organized Associated Publishers in order to produce
text books and other supplementary material
on Blacks which, at the time, was not readily accepted by most publishers.
A year later, he retired from academic life
to become Director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History and editor of the Journal of Negro History.
Woodson had taught at the elementary and high school level and served
as Dean of the School of Liberal Arts of Howard University.

ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF NEGRO LIFE AND HISTORY
The Association, located at 1538 Ninth Street N.W., was long the sole
professional agency concerned with preserving
the historical record of Black people in American life. The organizing
pioneer behind the Association was Carter Woodson,
a scholar and lecturer who began publication of the Journal of Negro
History in 1916. Ten years later, Woodson inaugurated
observance of "Negro History Week," during which leaders of the Black
freedom struggle were appropriately honored,
primarily in schools. Negro History Week, Black History Month, is always
celebrated in February, as close as possible to the
birthdays of both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Many of Woodson's books have become the foundations upon which more
contemporary historians have based their research.
These include The Education of the Negro prior to 1861 (1915);
A Century of Negro Migration(1918); The Negro in our History (1922); The Rural Negro (1930);
The Miseducation of the Negro and the Negro and
the History of the Negro Church.

These are the words of Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, distinguished
Black author, editor, publisher, and historian
(December 1875 - April 1950).
Carter G. Woodson believed that Blacks should know their past in order
to participate intelligently in the affairs in our country.
He strongly believed that Black history - which others have tried so
diligently to erase -
is a firm foundation for young Black Americans to build on in order
to become productive citizens of our society.

Known as the "Father of Black History," Carter G. Woodson holds an
outstanding position in early 20th century American history. Woodson
authored numerous scholarly books on the positive contributions of Blacks
to the development of America. He also published many magazine articles
analyzing the contributions and role of Black Americans. He reached
out to schools and the general public through the establishment of several
key organizations and founded Negro History Week (precursor to Black
History Month). His message was that Blacks should be proud of their
heritage and that other Americans should also understand it.

Carter G. Woodson was born in New Canton, Buckingham County, Virginia,
to former slaves Anne Eliza (Riddle) and James Henry Woodson. Although
his parents could neither read nor write, Carter G. Woodson credits
his father for influencing the course of his life.
His father, he later wrote, insisted that "learning to accept insult,
to compromise on principle,
to mislead your fellow man, or to betray your people, is to lose your
soul."

His father supported the family on his earnings as a carpenter. As
one of a large and poor family, young Carter G. Woodson was brought
up without the "ordinary comforts of life." He was not able to attend
school during much of its five-month term because helping on the farm
took priority over a formal education. Determined not to be defeated
by this setback, Carter was able "largely by self-instruction to master
the fundamentals of common school subjects by the time he was seventeen."
Ambitious for more education, Carter and his brother Robert Henry moved
to Huntington, West Virginia, where they hoped to attend the Douglass
High School. However, Carter was forced to earn his living as a miner
in Fayette County coal fields and was able to devote only a few months
each year to his schooling. In 1895, a twenty-year-old Carter entered
Douglass High School, where he received his diploma in less than two
years.

From 1897 to 1900, Carter G. Woodson began teaching in Winona, Fayette
County. In 1900, he returned to Huntington to become the principal of
Douglass H.S.; he finally received his Bachelor of Literature degree
from Berea College, Kentucky. From 1903 to 1907, he was a school supervisor
in the Philippines. Later he traveled throughout Europe and Asia and
studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1908, he received his
M.A. from the University of Chicago, and in 1912, he received his Ph.D.
in history from Harvard University.

During his lifetime, Dr. Woodson developed an important philosophy
of history. History, he insisted, was not the mere gathering of facts.
The object of historical study is to arrive at a reasonable interpretation
of the facts. History is more than political and military records of
peoples and nations. It must include some description of the social
conditions of the period being studied.

Woodson's work endures in the institutions and activities he founded
and promoted. In 1915, he and several friends in Chicago established
the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The following
year, the Journal of Negro History appeared, one of the oldest learned
journals in the United States. In 1926, he developed Negro History Week
and in 1937 published the first issue of the Negro History Bulletin.

Dr. Woodson often said that he hoped the time would come when Negro
History Week would be unnecessary; when all Americans would willingly
recognize the contributions of Black Americans as a legitimate and integral
part of the history of this country. Dr. Woodson's outstanding historical
research influenced others to carry on his work. Among these have been
such noted historians as John Hope Franklin, Charles Wesley, and Benjamin
Quarles. Whether it's called Black history, Negro history, Afro-American
history, or African American history, his philosophy has made the study
of Black history a legitimate and acceptable area of intellectual inquiry.
Dr. Woodson's concept has given a profound sense of dignity to all Black
Americans.

CHRONOLOGY of DR. WOODSON'S LIFE

1875, Dec. 19 Birth, New Canton, Virginia1892 Left home to work on the railroad and then in the mines1893 Family moved to Huntington, West Virginia 1895-1896 Attended Douglass High School, Huntington, West Virginia
1896-1897 Attended Berea College, Kentucky 1897, Sept.-Dec Attended Lincoln University, Pennsylvania 1898-1900 Taught, Winona, West Virginia 1900-1903 Principal, Douglass High School, Huntington, West Virginia
June 18, 1902-Dec. 1903 Attended University of Chicago 1903 Bachelor of Literature from Berea College 1903-1907 Taught in the Philippines 1907 Traveled in Europe and Asia; attended the Sorbonne, Paris,
France 1907, Oct.-Dec. Attended University of Chicago 1908, Jan.-Aug. Attended Graduate School, University of Chicago;
received B.A. in March; M.A. in August 1908-1909 Attended Harvard University 1909-1918 Taught, M Street (Dunbar) High School, Washington,
D.C. 1912 Ph.D. in History from Harvard University 1913 or 1914-1921 Member of the American Negro Academy 1915, Apr. The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 published
1915, Sept. Established the Association for the Study of Negro
Life & History 1917, Aug.29 First Biennial meeting of ASNLH 1918 A Century of Negro Migration published 1918-1919 Principal, Armstrong Manual Training School, Washington,
D.C. 1919-1920 Dean, School of Liberal Arts, Howard University 1920-1922 Dean, West Virginia Collegiate Institute (West Virginia
State College); Established Associated Publishers 1921 Received grant from the Carnegie Institution; The History
of the Negro Church published 1922 The Negro in Our History published 1924 Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the U.S. in 1830: Together
with Absentee Ownership of Slaves in the U.S. in 1830 published 1925 Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830
published 1926 Negro Orators and Their Orations published; The Mind of
the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis,
1800-1860 published; established Negro History Week; received Spingarn
Medal 1927 Appointed to Advisory Committee, Interracial Relations Committee
on Problems and Policy Social Science Research Council;
appointed staff contributor Dictionary of American Biography 1928 Negro Makers of History published; African Myths: Together
with Proverbs published 1928 Attended summer meeting of Social Science Research Council,
Dartmouth College 1929 The Negro as a Businessman, with John H. Harmon, Jr. and
Arnett G. Lindsay published 1929-1933, 1938 Established Woodson Collection at the Library
of Congress 1930 The Negro Wage Earner, with Lorenzo Greene published; The
Rural Negro published 1932 The encyclopedia controversy 1932-1935 Summers in Europe 1933 The Mis-Education of the Negro published 1934 The Negro Professional Man and the Community, with Special
Emphasis on the Physician and the Lawyer published 1935 The Story of the Negro Retold published 1936 The African Background Outlined published 1937 Began publication of the Negro History Bulletin 1939 African Heroes and Heroinespublished 1941 Doctor of Laws from West Virginia State College 1950, April 3 Died suddenly 1958 Elected to the Ebony Hall of Fame

Johnetta Page
A Classic in Black

Althea Gibson
A Classic in Black

born Aug. 25, 1927, Silver, SC
Something of a tomboy as a youngster in Harlem, Gibson played basketball,
stickball, and paddle tennis.
She won her age group New York City paddle tennis championship in 1939
and then began taking lessons at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club.
In 1946, a well-to-do black doctor, Hubert Eaton of Wilmington, NC, took
her in to help advance her career.
Barred from public courts because she was black, she practiced on Dr.
Eaton's backyard court.
Gibson began playing in the all-black American Tennis Association tournaments
in 1945 and won ten straight
women's singles titles, from 1947 through 1956. She was the first black
to play in the national indoor tournament,
in early 1950, and she finished second, which should have won her an invitation
to the U. S. National at Forest Hills.
No invitation came until after a letter from former champion Alice Marble
appeared in the July issue of
American Lawn Tennis magazine. Marble wrote, in part, "If Althea Gibson
represents a challenge to the
present crop of players, then it's only fair that they meet this challenge
on the courts."
It took Gibson a while to adjust to the stronger competition she was now
facing, but she broke through by winning
the French and Italian singles championships in 1956. She also teamed
with Angela Buxton to win the women's
doubles events at Wimbledon and in the French championship.
Gibson's big year was 1957, when she became the first black player to
win the Wimbledon singles title and the
first to win the U. S. National title. She also won the women's doubles
at Wimbledon
with Darlene Hard and the U. S. mixed doubles with Kurt Nielsen.
Gibson in 1957 was the first black to be named Associated Press female
athlete of the year.
She won the award again in 1958, when she repeated as singles champion
both at Wimbledon and in the U. S.
nationals and won her third straight Wimbledon women's doubles title,
this time with Maria Bueno.
A powerful serve and volley player, the 5-10 Gibson had the foot speed
and reach for great court coverage,
allowing her to return shots that seemed unreachable. A very popular champion,
she received accolades
from the press, fans, and fellow players for her accomplishments.
Late in 1958, she signed a $100,000 contract to play tennis exhibitions
at half-time of Harlem Globetrotter games.
She later played on the women's professional golf tour and pursued a career
as a singer and actress.
The tennis player Althea Gibson broke many barriers to become a celebrated
tennis champion.
Like the baseball player Jackie Robinson, she opened the sport of tennis
to future African-American players.
In 1950, she became the first African-American athlete to participate
in the U.S. National Championships,
and she later became the first African-American to play at Wimbledon.
In 1956 and 1957 she became the first
African-American to win the French championships, the U.S. Nationals,
and Wimbledon.
For these triumphs, Althea was named Woman Athlete of the Year in 1957.
After winning the U.S. Nationals and
Wimbledon for a second time in 1958, she played tennis professionally
and later joined the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
Althea was born on a cotton farm in South Carolina; her parents were sharecroppers.
A New York Police Athletic League coach
who saw Althea playing paddleball in Harlem encouraged her to play tennis.
In 1948 she won the first of ten straight national
black women's singles championships. While being interviewed by a biographer
Althea recalled, "I just found that I had a skill
at hitting that ball. And I enjoyed the competition."
In 1957, Gibson became the first African-American woman to not only compete,
but to win a Wimbledon singles title.
In 1958, Gibson was both a Wimbledon and U.S. National tennis champion.
"People thought I was ruthless," Gibson said.
"I was. I didn't give a darn who was on the other side of the net. I'd
knock you down if you got in the way. I just wanted to play my best."
Althea retired from competition in 1958. In 1971, she was named to the
National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame.
After a remarkable career and almost 100 professional titles, including
five Grand Slam crowns,
Althea took up golf and became the first African American to earn an LPGA
card.
In 1958, her autobiography I Always Wanted to Be Somebody was published.